The trouble with all this is that open access publishing has had incredible difficulties getting sustainable sources of financing.
arxiv.org has a budget of just $400,000. If 20 university libraries put up $20,000 a year, they could afford to keep the lights on. Many of these libraries can find $1 million to give to Elsevier, but they cannot find $20k to make physics, math and computer science literature available to all.
I can also say that there was another program that had people working in a building shared with arXiv.org that spend $2M of NSF money to build a educational web site that attracted almost no visitors. If arXiv.org had that kind of money they could have greatly expanded and done innovative things.
Cornell Library is, after years, trying to make a plan to fund the thing, but I can tell you that arXiv.org is a godawful place to work for a programmer because they see programmers as a cost center, not an opportunity center. I managed to stick it out for five years, but most people burned out after one or two, if they lasted that long. If there isn't a stable source of funding behind your paycheck you just don't get treated with respect.
Today I read about startup founders who've improved their quality of life by giving up on the idea of giving things away for free and I can say that personally, I'd rather run my business like Elsevier than arxiv.org. If you can't get paid for what you do it just destroys you.
I like the idealism of arXiv.org, but it seems like nobody likes it enough to fund it, even though it would take just $4 a year from registered users. Perhaps Paul Ginsparg is a McArthur Genius but Elsevier is smarter about the things that matter.
The fact that arXiv.org has had difficulties in becoming financially sustainable is irrelevant, because it represents only one of many possible models for providing open access to academic research.
Your comment reminds me a bit of all those industry experts who for years kept saying that tablet computing had no future, based on the embarrassing failure of Apple's Newton in 1993 and Microsoft's unsuccessful Tablet PC initiative in 2000. They were right until they weren't.
I'm not against open access in general, but I am getting increasing respect for people, like Stephen Wolfram, who can get academics who are always pleading poverty, to fork over huge amounts of money.
PLoS, the Public Library of Science, is now over five years old, and is financially sustainable. Perhaps Cornell Library could look at whatever PLoS is doing.
Why don't they pitch for money, like Wikipedia and NPR do? If they think they're above fundraising, then it stands to reason they will be broke.
I was deeply involved in xiph.org (vorbis, theora) for some time, same sort of situation. They were doing something arguably really important for the world (patent-free [rather, free of royalty-demanding patents] media tech), but struggled to scrape together a high 5-figure budget.
There needs to be a refactoring of how we think about and fund important endeavors that are not for profit.
I don't know how this is in other disciplines but in mine journals are most of the time "hosted" by schools or specific research groups. If the case is as simple as described I wonder why academics haven't abandon their publishers already.
I have no evidence of this but I suspect that publishers "support" high profile journals in one way or another - may it be something like helping engaged reviewers to publish/edit books, sponsor conferences, etc. It seems somewhat native to think that there is not competition among publishers in order to get high profile journals publishing with them and they will have to bring more convincing arguments besides "we will get you listed on Google scholar & Ebsco. I would really love to hear the opinion by someone knowing the system from the "business" side of journals, i.e. the hosting/sponsoring.
The article is talking about companies that hijack information for themselves, and I see a link for scribd. It seems that things will not change so soon.
The scribd link appears anytime you submit a PDF directly. This was/is useful for people who hate downloading PDFs, since scribd does not require this. Of course, a lot of us (myself included) use Chrome, which allows you to open PDFs inline...
From what I remember, the scribd side is even flakier than opening a PDF in your browser. And I'm not too keen on this "push our dogfood on readers" policy, either...
"In my view, what’s missing at this point is mostly anger -- a justified response to being asked to donate our time, not to Amnesty International or the Sierra Club, but to the likes of Kluwer and Elsevier."
writing gold: about a third of the way through the paper, "This article is supposed to be a review of a book called The Access Principle by John Willinsky (MIT Press, 2006)"
Speaking as someone who has been out of CS and working as a programmer for 10 years, it was REALLY accessible for such a lofty topic (and well-written). I managed to finish it in just a few days and understand almost all of it. I wish all academics would take the time to review the necessary background info for an educated reader. That is difficult but shows real understanding on their part, in addition to helping to spread their ideas.
As an aside, the first paragraph is meant to be sarcastic, but isn't that how both Apple and Android app stores work? You put out your app for free although you don't give out full copyright to it. People usually do this because they think this may lead to monetary gain for later. Being a highly downloaded app is a stamp of approval.
App stores only take a non-majority share of the revenue. They also provide the hardware platform, which is not easily replicated. Elsevier, on the other hand, takes ALL the profit, and does not have a difficult to replicate position on a hardware platform. The only reason people continue to use them is inertia.
While some app developers put free apps in the app store, they do so with an expected return on the investment, perhaps in the form of in-app purchases, in-app ad revenues, subscription fees, future contract work, or sales of related non-free apps.
arxiv.org has a budget of just $400,000. If 20 university libraries put up $20,000 a year, they could afford to keep the lights on. Many of these libraries can find $1 million to give to Elsevier, but they cannot find $20k to make physics, math and computer science literature available to all.
I can also say that there was another program that had people working in a building shared with arXiv.org that spend $2M of NSF money to build a educational web site that attracted almost no visitors. If arXiv.org had that kind of money they could have greatly expanded and done innovative things.
Cornell Library is, after years, trying to make a plan to fund the thing, but I can tell you that arXiv.org is a godawful place to work for a programmer because they see programmers as a cost center, not an opportunity center. I managed to stick it out for five years, but most people burned out after one or two, if they lasted that long. If there isn't a stable source of funding behind your paycheck you just don't get treated with respect.
Today I read about startup founders who've improved their quality of life by giving up on the idea of giving things away for free and I can say that personally, I'd rather run my business like Elsevier than arxiv.org. If you can't get paid for what you do it just destroys you.
I like the idealism of arXiv.org, but it seems like nobody likes it enough to fund it, even though it would take just $4 a year from registered users. Perhaps Paul Ginsparg is a McArthur Genius but Elsevier is smarter about the things that matter.