[Web4lib] A Library to Last Forever - NY Times OpEd piece on GoogleBook Search

[Steven E. Patamia, Ph.D.]

This has been an excellent thread.  With respect to the last thing Jennifer
just posted, may I add another thought.
I am certainly not the first one here or elsewhere to opine that, to
paraphrase Adam Smith, in the long run, publishers are all dead.  The
present thread is about conflicts of interest in making the past works
accessible while having someone with a connected profit motive gain a market
advantage in exchange for funding a chunk of the preservation.  Well, this
leads us inevitably to wonder about the future of publication.

My interest, and my reason for being a subscriber to this list, is that I
and the interests I am connected to, would like to see research publishers
basically disappear.  To us they have become an annoyance.  In the age of
the Internet they are replaceable with peer review systems residing in
virtual space.  I have a strong belief that basic scientific knowledge
should be free to all inhabitants of the planet.  I understand proprietary
interests, but it can be accomodated with effort.  What I do not accept is
that research funded by public resources should not be available to the
public except for a charge.  The scientific community seems slowly to be
waking up to the idea that journal publishers do not do anything that we
cannot now do for ourselves with a bit of organzation.  The research
community which I aim to foster would benefit from a more open, but
still appropriately reviewed, publication system.

The connection is that learning well the lessons of the Google book
publishing problem includes learning how to shape the future so that we do
not continue going through this agony. Perhaps what we will see is a a more
dramatic bifurcation of published works into the an "open access" category
and an "access for fee" category.  I think that there may always be a role
for publishers in a part of the "for fee" category, but I would caution them
to learn the lessons from the current death throws of conventional
publishers.   When the act of publication and dissemination achieves
anything close to zero marginal cost, supporting publication for fee becomes
really really hard.  May they rest in peace.

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Jennifer Heise <jenne.heise at gmail.com>wrote:

> > "Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only
> > one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the
> > country and hope to find it in the stacks."
> >
>
> Many commenters making reference to Interlibrary Loan are also
> ignoring the fact that the average person does not have access to the
> extensive web of Interlibrary Loan services accessible to the majority
> of us whose email addresses end in .edu!  Funding for even simple ILLs
> in public libraries is very small. I talk every day to people who
> struggle to get out of print volumes-- even stuff that is in the Early
> English Texts series! via ILL.
>
> And how many of us have sat and stewed when a researcher ILLs
> something sight unseen because it might be helpful-- at a cost to the
> institution of upwards of $40-- flipped through it, and returned it
> without leaving the ILL office because it wasn't what they needed? And
> our academic patrons.
>
> Now, that doesn't mean the Google settlement isn't problematic. But
> it's equally disingenuous to claim that the rights of future consumers
> of a non-profit book digitization scheme are likely to be hurt. If the
> Authors and Publishers'  organizations have their way, there will
> never be a non-profit book digitization scheme; they have blocked it
> so far, and in the future they would make it impossible for anyone,
> non-profit or not, to get to these items; look what happened with the
> Lexis-Nexis settlement. Rather than freelance authors getting paid for
> their older material that was being digitized, their material simply
> vanished from the searchable databases.
>
>
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-- 
Steven E. Patamia, Ph.D., J.D.
Personal Cell: (352) 219-6592