My Name Is Fernando Gros Not Greg Restall’s Reader

Hi Fernando,

Sorry, no offence intended — I’ve amended the blog to refer to you personally. It wasn’t that I hadn’t found your name or didn’t think it worth mentioning! I was trying — obviously misguidedly — to keep my post from becoming a confusing mesh of names as when reading postings I often find myself missing the point due to the referencing. I apologise for causing you such consternation.

For completeness, here’s the comment I posted at All My Eye in response to your input:

I appreciate your feedback — we do seem to be on the same page when it comes to distributing metadata to facilitate discovery. I suggested that you had missed the point (an unfortunately accusatory phrase, sorry) because I felt that the core issue is the underlying business model of the journal(s), rather than its distribution/visibility.

The cost of accessing a journal’s full text is determined by the publisher’s business model. Whilst there is great debate (to which I referred) about moving towards some form of Open Access, the majority of scholarly publishing is currently User Pays, i.e. a library or end user must have a subscription to a journal, or purchase individual articles via pay-per-view.

Thus increasing discoverability will not change the price at which the content can be accessed. Ingenta’s “model” is simply to enable users to buy individual articles for a price which equals the copyright fee + a delivery (handling) fee. The ensuing “far too high” cost is simply the cost at which we are instructed to sell the content by the publisher; it’s the cost of peer reviewed content when bought under a “just in time” pay-per-view model (as opposed to the “just in case” subscription model). No matter how widely the metadata is available, and in what portal (whether it’s iTunes or PubMed), full text access in most cases will still be subject to payment of a copyright fee.

The groups you refer to at King’s could enable increased visibility of their journal by depositing metadata in a variety of places, but the critical issue will be the business model they adopt. If their intended readership is unlikely to afford “user pays” costs, they will need to come up with a feasible “open access” model which enables users to access full text without payment. I wish them luck — it is certainly easier to do this from the outset (rather than switch the business model of an existing journal), but no scholarly publisher has yet found a successful (i.e. sustainable) way to do this.