Managing the transition to OA

T. Scott Plutchak has blogged an untitled post on the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing: How Will it Affect You? (Atlanta, October 16, 2006).  Excerpt:

The six panelists...represent a broad spectrum of informed opinion about the current state of publishing, and it was clear that there is no longer (if there ever really was) any blanket "anti-open access" sentiment in the publishing world, if we understand "open access" in its simplest and broadest form.  There was strong support on the part of all panelists for experimentation in as many forms as possible.    Mark Doyle (American Physical Society) put it most clearly -- if we were inventing publishing today, we wouldn't set it up the way that it currently is.  We are tied to anachronistic structures that made sense in the print world, but don't any longer.  The question is how do we get from here to there -- that is, how do you take a publishing enterprise that is primarily dependent on subscription revenue and transition it to some other economic model (whatever that model may be) in a sustainable manner?  Virtually every publisher that I talk to is engaged in some sort of experimentation trying to figure this out.

If librarians are going to be an effective part of the discussion, and if we are going to have some influence on the  direction in which publishing evolves, we need first of all to recognize that this is a completely legitimate and extremely difficult question.  We also need to recognize that opposition to FRPAA (for example) or scepticism about "author/funder pays" are not equivalent to opposition to open access in the broadest sense....