Showing posts with label economic benefits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economic benefits. Show all posts

29 September 2006

The Benefits of Open Access - for Publishers

Here's an interesting take on open access.

The benefits of this kind of openness for scientists and the public have been rehearsed many times; but this paper by Paul Peters, the Senior Publishing Developer of Hindawi Publishing Corporation, one of the leading open access outfits, presents some pretty compelling reasons why opening up is good for publishers - well, the smaller ones, at least:

While advocates of open access publishing have tended to focus on the benefits that it can offer authors and readers, there are equally important benefits that an open access publishing model can provide for small and mid-sized publishers. Within the existing subscription-based publishing industry there are a number of market forces that work against smaller publishers, and this is making it increasingly difficult for these smaller publishers to stay competitive. However, by adopting a business model based on publication charges, smaller publishers can overcome many of the difficulties that they currently face in the subscription market.

There are three main advantages that open access can provide for smaller publishers. One important advantage is that it makes the growth of both new and existing journals much easier. In addition, a shift to open access will promote more competition between publishers, which will enable many smaller publishers to gain a competitive edge over the largest and most well-established publishing houses. Finally, an open access publishing model will make a journal far more attractive to potential authors, since they can avoid many of the unnecessary limitations imposed by subscription-based models.

09 August 2006

The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing

One of the reasons it took a while for people to accept free software is that there is a traditional diffidence in the face of things that are free. After all, if something's free, it can't be worth anything, can it? The same infuriating obtuseness can be seen writ large when it comes to the environment: since the air and sea are all free, they can't be valuable, so polluting them isn't be a problem.

Against this background, it is no wonder that traditional economics pays scant regard to the value of the environment, and rarely factors in the damage caused to it by economic activities. It is also signficant that the seminal work on valuing all of Nature goes back to 1997, when Robert Costanza and his co-authors put the worth of the planet's annual contribution to mankind at a cool $33 trillion per year, almost certainly an underestimate.

So it's high time that this work was updated and expanded, and it's good to see that the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is providing some much-needed money to do precisely that:

Over the next year, with an $813,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Costanza and his team will create a set of computer models and tools that will give a sophisticated portrait of the ecosystem dynamics and value for any spot on earth.

"Land use planners, county commissioners, investment bankers, anyone who is interested," Cosntanza said, "will be able to go on the Web, use our new models, and be able to identify a territory and start getting answers."

For example, if a town council is trying decide the value of a wetland--compared to, say, building a shopping mall there--these models will help them put a dollar value on it. If a country wants to emulate Costa Rica's program of payments to landowners to maintain their land as a forest, they'll better be able to figure the ecosystem value of various land parcels to establish fair payments.

This is a critically-important project: let's hope its results are widely applied, and that we can use it as a step towards paying back the debt we owe Nature before it - and we - go environmentally bankrupt. (Via Digg.)