Paul Courant’s August 2006 article in First Monday includes a useful gloss on discussions of scholarship as a “public good” and the intersection with the economics of electronic publishing. He writes: “Unfortunately, although public goods can be extended to more users at zero cost, they can still be costly to produce in the first place. The case of digitally produced scholarship is of course an excellent example. What the theory tells us is that we ought to charge nothing for it at the margin — give it away. It tells nothing about how to pay for its production or how to determine how much to produce.”

See http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_8/courant/index.html

If members of scholarly societies think “what am I getting for this membership? A journal that I can already get through the library and the chance to blow a lot of money at a conference where people stand at a microphone and read papers?” then they might drop the membership. Societies may have to rethink what value they actually offer and how they can foster knowledge in the way that serves its members and society at large – even if that takes reinventing what they do.

As far as publishing goes, the Ithaka report (now available in an interactive edition) made the interesting observation that libraries had the resources and passion, but not the marketing savvy that UPs do. It will be interesting to see how the mergers of some UPs with library organizations will fare. Maybe another culture clash is in the works…

Final point – your “better OPAC” comment gives me hope. I think we probably will have a better (and probably cheaper) OPAC very soon largely because librarians fed up with the expensive and totally unsatisfactory ones being sold to us now have decided to try our own open source versions. The momentum is there. And when you see something like LibraryThing come up with constant innovations it makes you wonder why it’s taking us so long.

There’s a misconception at work here. Digital communication *done well* is not necessarily cheaper than print. Sure, you save paper, ink, and shipping, and you can reach far bigger audiences. But particularly in this rather long developmental period of moving scholarship from print to online, you have a lot of technology development costs, a need for new or retrained staff, and time to develop quite new workflows. And then there are the endless developments and upgrades, not only in technology but also in user expectations.

Another point of this very good article is that scholarly societies and university presses generally do not have the capital to invest in facilitating this shift. Commercial publishers generally *do* have that capital, and they’ve made good use of it.

Creating a new business model for scholarly communication is easier said than done (perhaps analogous to creating a better OPAC?) Let’s not start with the premise that it should be cheaper. How about starting with the idea that it could be done better (more flexibly for more potential audiences) and look carefully at what that costs.