Another University press has buckled under the weight of changing economics in the academic publishing game, and reduced budgets at many American universities. The East Tennessee University press will lay-off its remaining 11 employees as of August 31, according to Knoxnews.com. The full story is available at the Knox News site.

There is a lot of talk about Article Processing Charges (APC) and Open Access, and it just has never seemed to me that that is a sustainable business model. The issue comes up yet again in the RIN Report “Paying for Open Access Publication Charges.” Surprisingly enough the word “sustainability” is not used though the conclusions in this report center around the likely increased competition for funds as Open Access grows, and funds to pay APC’s centralize in libraries.

Philip Davis from Scholarly Kitchen notes:

[M]any library administrators are pushing for these author funds, and in many cases, the monies are simply being skimmed off existing library collection funds or were provided as a one-time gift from a Vice Chancellor before the economy took a nosedive. As the RIN report states on page 23, there is clearly not enough money to support both author-pays and subscription-pays models.

APC’s work for now in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine) fields, and ostensibly a pool would allow humanities and social science scholars the use of funds to pay APC’s if there were Open Access journals operating on that business model. But why move from one unsustainable model – the current print publication/learned society/university press model – to another?

Consulting guru Scott Ginsburg often comes up with compelling lists of how to do things right or wrong, and his list on how to make loyalty vanish made me think of traditional publishers, and their disconnection with their customers, and the tool (Google) their customers use to find information. See if any of these from Scott’s full list, ring a bell:

• Completely ignore the self-interest of everyone but yourself.

• Demonstrate complete and utter unwillingness to understand how other people experience you.

• Exude a constant sense of scarcity by creating a monopoly on information.

• Refuse to acknowledge, listen to or implement the ideas of ANYONE born after 1980.

• When people tell you their problems, reflexively respond with the following five-word lie: “I understand how you feel.”

The beauty of Open Access from our perspective anyway is that Open Access exists exclusively to connect people to information – on their terms – not someone else’s.

The NPR storyline reads:

Publicly funded research doesn’t seem so public when the public has to pay to read the results in a journal. A proposed law would help publishing companies preserve their business models, but it would limit public access to the research.

You can read the full transcript of Janet Babin’s piece on NPR or listen to it at the NPR website as well.