First Bloomsbury conference on e-publishing and e-publications “Models in flux: books and journals” Graham Taylor 28 June 2007

What I know for sure

The big deal works, for both sides Library budgets are disgracefully low The answer to the machine lies inside the machine Self-archiving cuts against the current sociology of the academy Access to the literature comes low down on the list of barriers to research productivity It’s easy to be a bad publisher

What publishers do gets taken for granted Publishers don’t ‘lock up content’ IPR, copyright, moral rights are not awkward impediments to progress, they are the foundations of orderly communication The scholarly publishing market is not dysfunctional, but it is in flux Journals are about registration, validation and reward as well as access “No one wants to get an e-book for Christmas”

These things also seem to me to be pretty self-evident

We live in times of great uncertainty All publishing has costs that need to be sustained We all have to play fair It’s more about access to funds and distribution than technology e-books won’t look like the digitised text files of today

Books will not disappear, but they may lose their primacy Publishers don’t oppose open access Digital publishing is not cheaper. Getting it out there is not enough.

What I don’t know

Why Institutional Repositories should be any different to small university presses What students want, and how do they want to learn? Who is going to pay to preserve digital-only information? What constitutes ‘fair dealing/ fair use’ in digital media? What I don’t know

So what might be happening?

The academy is trying to regain control of scholarly publishing ‘Good enough’ is taking over Developments in consumer technology may overlap back into scholarly publishing The frontier mentality is back, especially among the big guys

What I’m curious about

Why asking people whether they want everything for free now or later can be a valid base on which to built policy When will there be an iPoD of reading? Participation technology (Web 2.0) is a winner, but for what? e-books and e-journals together may represent ‘transformation’, for some

Will ‘collective intelligence’ supplant ‘expert intelligence’? If publishing is so easy and cheap, why don’t they get out there and do it instead of throwing mud at publishers? How are we to measure research productivity? In time, will the blogers and the ‘amateur publishers’ overhaul the professionals?

So what concerns me?

OA may offer benefits, but it’s the net benefits that count. The blind eye being turned to the potential consequences of self-archiving The tolerance of version proliferation, as the price for ‘wider access’ The ‘nodes’ theory The obvious need for scaleable, sustainable business models

Folk who mix evidence with advocacy, and teaching with preaching All the Google pilot services coming together into one mega offer What on earth is going to happen to the retailers, apart from Amazon? The visions of OA vs. Economic reality We could be heading for a ‘perfect storm’

Hypotheses

“Social networking is just that – social” “We ain’t seen nothing yet” “The dysfunctional market is the digital learning market” “The current system works well for 90% of researchers”