Information Technology Reference
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markets. Third, customers generally pay in advance, usually annually,
before the product is created or distributed.
Journal publishers, especially the large ones, who are able to provide
a critical mass of quality content supported by cutting-edge technology,
are in a very strong position. However, despite these strengths, the
journal publishing industry does face threats. There is a groundswell of
opinion that the outputs of scholarly research, funded by public money,
should be unrestricted and open to all users on the internet without
financial or other barriers. This is known as Open Access (OA), as
discussed earlier in this chapter and by other contributors to this topic.
The debate between the pro-OA lobby and the scholarly publishing
industry has been fierce, with the publishers defending their business
model and pointing out the value they bring to the process in terms of
organizing peer review, editorial review and, of course, the organization
of articles into discipline-specific journals. On the other hand, there are
those who argue that, in the age of the internet, the role of the scholarly
publisher is no longer required. Indeed it is true that all the functions
of the publisher could quite easily be undertaken by the author and his
or her peers. In the age of the desktop, typesetting is not required,
social networking could facilitate a new form of peer review and articles
could be distributed from authors' websites.
Taken to its conclusion, such a model for the publication of scholarly
material might very well create anarchy. Journal publishers would go
out of business and researchers would not have the motivation to
publish. They would not receive the registration and recognition
provided by the current publishing system. If they did continue to
publish, there would be hundreds of thousands of journal articles each
year, distributed across thousands of websites. Users would have great
difficulty in finding articles or understanding their provenance.
OA proponents have suggested that there is still a role for publishers
in this model - the role of providing 'overlay services'. In this model, the
journal publisher is no longer the distributor of content but becomes the
provider of specialist peer-review services such as interfaces to articles
deposited in institutional or subject repositories, guaranteeing that they
have passed the journal's quality standards. This model offers small
comfort for the shareholders of the large publishing houses. The change
from being the distributor of unique content to that of being one of many
firms competing to provide editorial services is not compelling. No
