Publishers may soon compete with libraries. The business case for enticing users away from library-managed portals is simple,
compelling, and growing. As funding agencies and universities enact
Open Access (OA) mandates and publishers transition their journals
from the site-license model to the Gold OA model, libraries will
cease to be the spigots through which money streams from universities
to publishers. In the Gold-OA world, the publishers' core business is
developing relationships with scholars, not librarians. For publishers, it makes
perfect sense to cater to scholars both as authors and readers.
Current direct-to-scholar portals provided by publishers do not
live up to their potential. Each portal is limited to content from
just one publisher. Without interoperability, each publisher portal
is an island. Only scholars covered by a site license can afford to
use them, and those scholars have access to a gateway for all
site-licensed content irrespective of publisher: their library web
site. In spite of these near-fatal flaws, publishers invest heavily
in their direct-to-scholar portals.
These portals are opportunities for future growth. The model is
well established: Thomson Reuters' Westlaw is the de-facto standard for legal research in the US, and it is
able to command premium pricing for structured public-domain
information. It may take a long time for scholarly publishers to
duplicate Westlaw's success. Yet, even without access fees,
publishers might be able to unlock significant marketing and
business-intelligence value from their systems. Knowledge from
managing the publishing process combined with usage data from their
portals will give publishers unprecedented insight into every aspect
of scholars' professional lives in education, research, and
development.
For publishers, the transition to Gold OA is rather tricky. They
hope to maintain their current level of revenue while replacing the
income stream from site licenses with an equivalent income stream
from author page charges. This goal, implausible just a few years
ago, now seems realistically within their grasp. The outcome remains
far from certain, and publishers are hedging their bets by fighting
Green OA and lobbying hard for embargo periods. As long as
site-license revenue is their main source of revenue, publishers
cannot afford to compete with libraries and journal aggregators,
their current customers and partners. This calculation will change
when Gold OA reaches a certain critical point. This is the context of
proposals like CHORUS, an attempt to take over Green OA, and Elsevier's acquisition of Mendeley, a brilliant social-network interface for scholarly content.
Publishers, indexing services, journal aggregators, startups, some
nonprofit organizations, and library-system vendors all have
expertise to produce compelling post-OA services. However, publishers
only need to protect their Gold OA income, and any new revenue
streams are just icing on the cake. All others need a reasonable
expectation of new revenue to develop new services. This sets the
stage for a significant consolidation of the scholarly-communication
industry into the hands of publishers.
As soon as the Gold OA shock hits, academic libraries must be
ready to engage publishers as competitors. When site licenses disappear, there is no more journal-collection development, and digital lending of journals disappears as a core service. This is a time that requires major strategic decisions from
leaders in academia. With its recently released new mission
statement, the Harvard Library seems to pave the way: “The Harvard Library advances scholarship and teaching by committing itself to the creation, application, preservation and dissemination of knowledge.” The future of the academic library will be implemented on these
pillars. While the revised mission statement necessarily lacks
specifics, it is crystal-clear in what it omits: collection
development.
