From the Chronicle, via Open Access News:
Sanford G. Thatcher, director of Penn State University Press and president of the Association of American University Presses, calls Harvard’s [open access] policy “shortsighted” because it might result in the loss of subscription and reprint income to humanities and social-science journals. His own press receives two-thirds of its journal income through royalties from Project Muse, an online collection of journals. “If that were to collapse,” he says, “so too would our journals disappear from the face of the earth.”
Mr. Thatcher: Tear down this (pay)wall.
Whose side are you on? You represent university presses. Remember, it was the university’s own faculty who voted to adopt this policy. Yet you are spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the potential impact of green OA on subscriptions — when no causative link has ever been shown.
In fact, Johns Hopkins, the university which hosts Project Muse — whose revenue, you fear, could “collapse” under the weight of self-archiving by responsible authors — this week opened its own institutional repository.
University presses, and the authors and universities they serve, should tell Mr. Thatcher that his statements don’t represent them. Tell the AAUP to stop spreading FUD about open access.
Scholarly publishers need help adapting to the open access era — not fighting it. The AAUP can serve its constituents by helping them adopt sustainable open access models. Fighting the tide — and universities’ own faculty — isn’t serving anyone.
Update: I should add, for those readers who aren’t also mind-readers, that I am aware the AAUP has been involved in open access initiatives. That’s why I was so taken aback by this statement, which borders on willfully misleading and does little to move the discussion forward.
I also recognize that sometimes, journalists select a quote from a context other than one the speaker would prefer. (Been there…) So, for all I know, the quote was immediately followed by a comment that “…but there’s no evidence yet that self-archiving will damage this revenue stream, and I hope that libraries and faculty will join publishers in seeking responsible ways to preserve and enhance journals’ value proposition.” But I can only know what’s in the paper, and what’s in the paper ain’t pretty.
“so too would our journals disappear from the face of the earth.”
A little over dramatic. Has this guy seen Google groups, or a science blog, or any number of ways you can get academic content onto the Internet without going through a journal? In a couple sentences, he waves off the hard work of people at the Internet Archive and WebCite.org as they try to give real weight to the URL, or the growing network of academics courageous enough to put their work online. His comments reveal little more than his own shortsightedness and his own misguided fears.