publishing business models

I sat in on three uniquely distinct presentations yesterday, "Should UPresses adopt an OA Business model?, "No Budget, No Worries," and "Sydney's eScholarship framework," and came away with a sense of tremendous commonalities in OA and equally significant distinctions. Albert Greco's fast paced number crunching comparison of Big Publishing vs OA alternatives was a brilliant display of the tremendous profits still available in an industry with "low betas" and "high alphas." Greco stressed the reason Wall Street was still investing heavily into an industry "where 7 of 10 loose money, 2 break even and 1 is a financial hit!" was that "while the economics of publishing are harsh and unforgiving, they are still understandable and predictable . . . you can model with confidence for 5 years!" I can't begin to presume to cover the details of his confidently projected industry review (see the PP here
GRECO%20%26%20WHARTON%20ELPUB%202008%20TORONTO%20POWER%20POINTS.ppt) but the end-game of the talk is that OA can offer as reliable and sustainable a business model for publishers . . .

What followed was a PP presentation by Tarek Loubani (in "low resolution" he intro'd!) was a realized example of full-blown OA Journal founded and maintained on zero business (though perhaps Greco would want to see some profit margins?). The description of Open Medicine's founding and development was in turn a sales pitch for the value of OJS
and a walk through of some amazing open source tools that frame the backend of the journal (and which Tarek encourages everyone to explore and use which is why I list them here . . .). Openwengo is the communication protocol they use (think Skype in os), mediawiki which undergirds Wikipedia can be used to underlie all wiki traffic, gnu mailman is their mailing list mgmt system; they also use Open Office (" . . . nothing beats them in the backend!" Tarek stressed), Firefox, Konqueror and epiphany are browsers (and Canada is 2nd in world using os browsers, which these 3 are) and Lemon8 is what flips their Word doc into XML and then PDF or whatever format they require (including "generating HTML on the fly"). We are about to launch an OA journal for Faculty of Information here at U of T (F/IQ) so I will be sure we try out many of these tools for our own project . . .

The third of this publishing models trio was Ross Coleman's comprehensive overview of the very successful eScholarship program being run at USydney. Like Greco's PP, the content was so dense I can't hope to re-present it here (but I didn't snag the slides so poke around the Sydney site for egs. of their successful project) . . . but I would comment that the one person who approached Ross after the session was Greco himself because he was intrigued in this example of a UPress that consisently runs in the black. It would be interesting to follow their on-going correspondence (if any) after this conference. We are in a rich time of publishing re-tooling and these interchanges of ideas, models and cut & paste mash-ups that happening here in the ELPUB lecture hall and hallways is surely one of the engines behind the horizon of things that will come into our view as we travel forward (think Gutenberg on the net!)