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subscribers whom journal publishers risk losing to the arXiv and similar
services. So far, it does not seem that these services are going to push
formal journals out of the marketplace in any wholesale way, but
publishers must be aware of their capability to erode the subscriber base.
Open Access
It is worth pointing out that OA, in its various manifestations, poses
another threat to the traditional journal model. It is not that traditional
journals
cannot
continue in an OA environment - ultimately, OA is just
one pricing model among many, one that shifts the cost of a journal
from the reader to some other party. However, the reality (at least so
far) is that sustainable, long-term OA publishing models have yet to
emerge. The Public Library of Science (PloS) uses 'bulk, cheap
publishing of lower-quality papers' (Butler, 2008) to make possible the
OA distribution of more serious work, and although OA publisher
BioMed Central characterizes itself as 'pleasantly profitable' (Butler,
2008), it was sold to Springer in 2008 and its future business model
remains in question. At the same time, various science, technical and
medical publishers' attempts at creating OA options within the context
of for-profit publishing (such as Springer's Open Choice programme)
have yet to show much more than potential. In this environment, one
in which the sustainability of OA is still very much in question,
mandates such as those imposed by the National Institutes of Health
(2008) in the USA and Research Councils UK (2006), not to mention
those imposed internally by universities, may force the scholarly
literature to breathe air that cannot sustain it. If a professor whose
university imposes a hard OA mandate wishes to publish in a journal
that does not allow free public distribution of its articles, that professor
is prevented from doing so. There are good arguments to be made in
favour of such a policy. On the other hand, limiting an author's
publication options in such a way will also entail costs and
consequences, not all of them intentional. One likely consequence is a
greater difficulty for journal publishers. How great will the difficulty
become? It is much too soon to say, but it is worth keeping in mind.
