Rather than respond directly to your comment, I’d just like to point out to my readers that the University of California has responded to the press release you mention. UC’s response is available in PDF form, here:

http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/UC_Response_to_Nature_Publishing_Group.pdf

I realise that your post is about wider issues of scholarly publishing and communication, and not just about the letter from University of California and California Digital Library.

However, I wanted to share NPG’s public statement on this matter, where we have fully described our understanding and position. You can find our statement here: http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cdl.html

Nature Publishing Group will be doing all we can to bring discussions with CDL to a successful conclusion as soon as possible.

Grace Baynes
Nature Publishing Group

“It seems to me that the first place to start would be the university presses. Many of them barely make money as it is, are overly protective of their bottom line, hence erratically vet titles or become too specialist, and they are part of our world theoretically. They should convert fully to serving the needs of the university’s base, its scholars.”

although Cohen’s advise sounds like a good immediate step, it is still bound up with the logic of the university press as intermediary merchant. the brilliance of Beth’s Journal Club metaphor is that it underhandedly suggests that the way to exorcize the middle man is to emulate the way the unnamed narrator exorcizes Tyler Durden: by shooting ourselves in the face and surviving.

practically speaking, little-old unknown me could have a publication-quality essay up and running online, where almost everyone in my field can read it, in only the time it takes me to write it. this is the first time in human history this is possible. want prestige and promotions? add a few weeks for a peer-review process; unleash the beast in an online repository that is visited assiduously by most in this or that field. heck, let the beast track down the field, and voila. this is what’s possible and practical with decade old technologies. talk about a big elephant in the room.

the math in Beth’s argument I found exquisite as well. because it is a circle of lard morphing the producer into a consumer, the idea that the academy should avoid the cost of subsidizing an open-source scholarship in the name of fiscal responsibility can only be what Freud called a dream, a semi-rational fantasy whose sole purpose is to keep us sleeping. as semi-closed ecosystems, it is no longer a secret that we can reduce our collective costs in the long run if we simply upgraded the “presses” from petty merchants to a new breed of librarians. I say, promote them to clerics of the court, networkers, disseminators, techie ground-breakers and good riddance. there’s the elephant’s twin sister for you.

with two such elephants in the room, I’m tempted to do a reading of the collective perversity that keeps open scholarship at bay. as we stand, we are not those rebuffed men and women going back to the cave to illuminate their dangling brethren with tales of the sun, we are more like half-stoned tourists in all-inclusive resorts, rubbing SPF-45 over inane reruns of Foucault while paying lip-service to A Better World, Inc.©

because the cost and relatively limited amount of space in the print journals of yesteryear forced the peer-review process to be more selective, we sort of added the prestige of sportsmanship to publishing. no wonder it became THE criteria for tenure. alas, scholarship doesn’t necessarily need to win the race to be good scholarship. an honest and unconstrained peer-review system should not be afraid of watering down the wells of knowledge. in contrast to material goods, the widest distribution of the best ideas can only take place in a (non-)market open to all peers.

look to the presses no more, look to the young scholars! they are the key! secure their peerage and you will see an open-source academy in two generations time.

still unpublished in print…