Chicken Shop Disruption
A source known for advocating change and OA accidentally argues for disrupting OA
Disruption is a funny thing. After all, if the disrupting model becomes mainstream, isn’t it setting itself up for disruption? Isn’t disruption a pattern and not a one-time thing?
These questions arise in a recent Times Higher Education story about a Wikipedia-like model for The Literary Encyclopedia, which was launched online in 2000 by British and American academics. The model proposed is similar to the one OA accidentally disrupted — low subscription costs to members of societies, profits returned to the members, and so forth.
The editors of The Literary Encyclopedia complain about OA implicitly as having created a publishing paradigm with “lost relationships . . . with individual readers and . . . overproducing in an extraordinary manner. It’s only really interested in the bottom line.”
But first, we have to get some facts straight, because as usual, THE reporting is woefully lacking in its perspicuity.