Recently I attended a debate called Intellectual Property Rights: Wrong for Developing Countries?" at the National Academies in Washington, D.C. The two speakers were Bruce Lehman, Chairman of the International Intellectual Property Institute, and John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science Commons. I had sort of hoped for entertainment purposes that one of them would have take the position "Yes, they are," and the other "No, they're not," but life isn't as simple as that and the two actually seemed not to be particularly at odds with each other.

In fact, it was an area where they tacitly agreed that caught my attention the most. Both, at one point or another, referred to scholarly journals as "content providers". In particular I found it odd when it was remarked that academics passing around photocopies of scholarly articles and forwarding them among one another online was leading to rising subscription fees for journals and hurting their profitability.

Well, as someone working in higher education, I don't really think of scholarly journals as content providers. I think of the academics that research and write the articles as content producers, and the journals merely as distribution channels. Thus, if academics are passing articles around using the Internet, it's because the Internet is a superior distribution channel to the journals themselves -- even when those journals are themselves online unless they also offer open access.

Furthermore, even if journals are having a hard time making ends meet, is that really a dreadful thing? Academics already volunteer to serve on journal editorial boards as part of their commitment to service. With free technologies like the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems, it's not difficult even for an academic department with fairly limited resources to publish its own journal online, complete with peer review and open access. A good example is the International Journal of Education and Development using ICTs published by the Distance Education Centre of the University of the West Indies. Given this, as university departments take the final step to publish journals online, the demise of the subscription based journal model will seem little different then that of buggy whip makers during the rise of the automobile.

There is one important aspect of subscription based scholarly journals that isn't addressed by simply replacing them with online open access alternatives, and that is the relative prestige that publication in different journals offers. Each discipline has its pecking order when it comes to what journals in which one would most like to see one's article be published, and especially for those on the tenure track, that's a potentially perilous aspect to take lightly. At the same time, however, given the advantages of open access and online distribution, how long can this save subscription based journals?

In fairness to John Wilbanks, he was a passionate proponent of increasing access to knowledge, and he did remark that it seems like journal publishers are among those industries that have done a poor job finding new business models that work when faced with the Internet. But I wonder if it's merely a failure of their imagination. I'm hard pressed to think of a way they can add value when every aspect of scholarly articles from concept to peer review to distribution can now be handled without them. Could it be that they're simply dinosaurs in a world where it has begun to snow?

tags: Washington, D.C. United States science-research

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