Open Publishing: how publishers are reacting

Publishers are all in favour of maximising access to works of scholarship; it's good for authors, and it's good for journals. Open Access is not all or nothing - there are a variety of ways in which publishers can increase access to journals: licensing, archival access, author agreements, deals for less developed countries, not to mention the Open Access business model. However, publishing costs money (even electronic publication does not reduce costs dramatically), and the costs need to be recovered somehow. Placing content in freely accessible open archives without having an alternative cost-recovery model in place could be disastrous, for journals are genuinely valuable to the scholarly community. Moving towards the Open Access model may be attractive, but it's not simple. The textual version of this presentation at the Conference "Open Access to Scientific and Technical Information: State of the Art and Future Trends" (Paris, 23-24 January 2003) was published in "Information Services and Use", vol. 23 (2003), issue 2-3, p. 99-101