1. What’s a Publisher to Do?
Coping with Open Access
Joseph J. Esposito
Portable CEO
Highwire Press Presentation
espositoj@gmail.com
April 21, 2005

2. Topics
• Defining Open Access
• What is a legacy publication?
• What is beyond the scope of this talk?
• Defining and defending one’s interests
• The “rings” of journal subscriptions
• Moving to the inner rings
• OA: Friend or foe?
• Leakage
• After legacy publications, what?

3. Core—
Never
Cancelled
Already
Cancelled
Unlikely
to be cancelled
Vulnerable
journals;
cancellation
possible
How vulnerable is your journal?

4. What is Open Access?
• Various definitions and conventions
(Budapest, Bethesda, etc.)
• Potentially covers all intellectual property
• For our purposes, we are discussing only
research journals
• Lowest-common-denominator OA:
accessible by anyone with a Web browser

5. Legacy Publication
• Already exists; not a new publication
• Some revenue derived from subscriptions
• Medium is irrelevant (print or electronic)
• Conforms to scholarly conventions (e.g.,
prepublication peer review)
• Profits or surplus (if any) distributed to
shareholders or used for other activities
• Universe: about 24,000

6. Not on the Table Today . . .
• The future of scholarly communications
• The ideal way research should be
conducted and disseminated
• New business models
• New businesses
• Responsibilities of the scholarly
community
• Instead, let’s talk about your interests as a
journal publisher

7. One Community, Many Interests
• Librarians seek comprehensive collections
• Librarians seek lower prices
• Scholars seek to publish and to read
• Administrators seek metrics to guide in
tenure decisions
• Publishers seek markets and a
competitive return on capital
• None of these is a “wrong” interest

8. Why Do Librarians Cancel
Subscriptions?
• Poor quality of journal
• Shifting academic requirements
• Limited budget (price increases, university
cutbacks, allocations for new products and
projects)
• Availability of material from other sources
• Resistance to business practices
• Etc.

9. Core—
Never
Cancelled
Already
Cancelled
Unlikely
to be cancelled
Vulnerable
journals;
cancellation
possible
How vulnerable is your journal?

10. Strategy: Get to the Center
• Superior editorial program
• Superior business practices
• Exclusivity of content

11. What Makes Content Not
Exclusive?
• Availability through aggregators
• Liberal interlibrary loan policies
• Liberal single-document availability
• Open Access (lowest-common-
denominator variety)
• OA is just one of several ways that
exclusivity is undermined

12. Leakage
• The “escape” of copyrighted material from
sealed containers
• Sometimes legitimate, mostly not
• Various means (preprint servers,
institutional repositories, mandated
archives, simple email attachments)
• Leakage is inevitable
• DRM mostly not effective

13. Tactics
• Avoid confrontations over OA
• Slow down the slide toward OA without
alienating customers and readers
• Run legacy journals as mature businesses
(maximize cash, reduce marketing)
• Extend the life as long as possible,
generating as much cash as you can
• Use the cash to invest in new products,
not in the legacy journals

14. What Does the Future Look Like?
• All journals are mature
• Some will be run for cash (the right way)
• Some publishers will invest in legacy
journals (siphoning off capital)
• Use cash to start innovative products
(innovate by form, not by content)—e.g.,
heirs to arXiv
• A multiplicity of forms will evolve

15. Core—
Never
Cancelled
Already
Cancelled
Unlikely
to be cancelled
Vulnerable
journals;
cancellation
possible
How vulnerable is your journal?