Return of the Big Brands: How Legacy Publishers Will Coopt Open Access
"Unsurprisingly, the Activist perspective caught fire in libraries, where open access was seen as a means to offset the growing market dominance of a handful of scholarly publishers. Unacknowledged then and now in library circles is that a fully OA universe is one without libraries..."
"Thus we have the cascading model: articles rejected by the editors of the big brand-name journal are directed to other publications in the same family. This cascade can be to toll-access publications (the shining example is the line extension of the Nature Publishing Group) or to OA venues that exist to soak up the funding from OA mandates. The toll-access variant is challenged, however, by the limitations of library budgets. It just may be that no one is going to be able to emulate Nature, as Nature got there first (the value of strategic vision) before libraries were sidelined as publishing growth markets. Thus practitioners of the cascading model are likely to move to the Gold OA model..."
"Libraries will continue to purchase large aggregations, though from fewer and fewer publishers; and funding bodies will continue to build the market for mandated OA publication with attendant APCs (simultaneously and causally reducing the amount of money that goes toward research). Library publishing will suffer as more authors migrate to the branded OA services. The publishing market for scholarly material will grow.."
