MESSING WITH CASH COWS
I guess publishers like Elsevier must have fallen on hard times, what with competition from all kinds of free information on the internet, and librarians canceling subscriptions to outrageously priced serials and abstracting services.
According to classic economic theory, such challenges should force companies to do some soul-searching to try to understand why their intended users hate them. According to theory, this should either induce them to improve their services to meet user complaints, or put them out of business. But who needs to bother with classical economic theory when they can buy themselves a law making it illegal for government to offer competing services?
That's why PubScience (http://pubsci.osti.gov/), the government's abstracting service for energy, science and technology journals, is under attack. In an article in the July 2 Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/free/2001/07/
2001070202t.htm), Andrea Foster reports that the Energy Department's 2002 appropriations bill, H.R. 2311, steeply reduces appropriations, on the grounds that the "committee is concerned that [with PubScience] the department is duplicating technical information services that are already available from the private sector." Apparently this language was inserted into the House report "after lobbying by the Software & Information Industry Association on behalf of member companies, including Chemical Abstracts Services, Reed Elsevier, and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts."
We should have seen this end run coming. If you visit the Government Affairs section of the Software & Information Industry Association's web site (http://www.siia.net/govt/default.asp), you will see their ambitions cloaked in the guise of "effective policies to ensure diverse sources" that "complement the federal, state and local sources of this information." Because government information users should continue "to have access to the information products and services on which they rely," it's necessary to "prevent government competition with the private sector," because the private sector does a better job of understanding consumer needs and enhancing public access.
Oh, please. It's kind of hard to enhance public access when your product is so expensive it absorbs entire library budgets at a gulp and isn't even full enough to burp.
There is also this consideration: I don't use the word "free" to describe government-provided information; I call it "pre-paid." Much of the research that is published and abstracted by commercial services was paid for with taxpayer dollars. Government agencies rightly return it to taxpayers at no additional cost.
Government has no obligation to turn over taxpayer-created information to private publishers so that they can make a fortune off it. If publishers can use it to create a product that is both so outstanding and so affordable that libraries cannot do without it, more power to them (West's key system for legal documents apparently has more than enough added value to allow it to continue to compete with the texts of court cases freely available on the web).
Publishers may mouth the words "competition" and "public-private partnerships," but what they are complaining about is the endangerment of their incredibly lucrative government-sponsored free ride. What they want is no competition at all, and the continuation of their subsidy: the exclusive use of publicly funded information to make private profits. The government not only has a right to compete with extortionate private enterprise in this instance; it has an actual duty.
The appropriations bill has yet to be considered in the Senate, where, according to Declan Butler's article in the June 28 issue of Nature, Senator Joseph Lieberman has introduced legislation encouraging government agencies to produce services like PubScience. So it's not too late to send your senators letters (not e-mail, which they tend to ignore) to make sure they understand what's involved here. After all, if PubScience can be so easily closed down for the cost of a few campaign contributions and a Washington office, do you doubt that the next target is Medline and the BioMed project? Or that they're salivating at the thought of forcing those users to buy their competing products?
For more information about this, read the article by Declan Butler in Nature [free access] at http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/
butler.html.
* * * * *
COOL QUOTE
And yet I still think [book] reviews are of some importance, aside from occasionally being entertaining in themselves. In the first place, they can be effective examples of what Northrop Frye described as "a form of consumer's research." In an industry where style, advertising and promotion are increasingly being called upon to move product, reviews remind us that substance counts. Reviewers help to keep it real.
But more than this, a review is a testament to the idea that books matter as something more than mere consumer products. Reviews represent the exercise of a critical faculty on what we read. I should emphasize that this isn't any particular critical faculty I'm referring to, my own or that of a "centre of authority," but simply the idea that we all should read critically.
…
There is nothing the book industry - and, I suspect, many authors - would like more than to get rid of reviews entirely. We are not effective advertising. Our focus on content rather than image makes us hopelessly out of step with the times. . . In the twenty-first century we may well become an endangered species - a few of us kept alive in captivity to serve as quote whores, but otherwise extinct in our native habitat of books.
"A Defence of Reviewing" by Alex Good http://www.goodreports.net/defence.htm
* * * * *
You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:
Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.
Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.
