In reply to Cameron Neylon.

When we talk about scholarly communications, we need to be clear if we're talking about content or services, because different economics are at play in the two scenarios. Services can be rivalrous whereas content is not. There can be a market for services, provided we don't scare it away. The way to build this market is to create investment opportunities and celebrate acquisitions, rather than threatening to "nationalize" things all the time. That only helps to reinforce the status quo, which I have on good authority that readers of this blog are not happy with ;-)

I have been harping on this lately because we're at a point where content providers are transitioning to services, yet people still fall back on thinking that is derived from content-based economics in so many of the discussions around the web. How do we re-orient the discussion here?

For example, if a private entity creates a service and researchers choose to spend their grant money on it, it's not like a tax, despite the money coming from a federal source, because they are making a personal choice on how to allocate it. A researcher is free to choose to use a private company's service for entirely selfish reasons, and the collective effect of these choices, according to economic theory, will create a marketplace with competition and supply and demand.

The marketplace will of course have externalities like any, and those should be managed. For example, assigning identifiers, resolvers for the IDs, and metadata & relationship schemas are essential for interoperability so that we don't end up with a bunch of silos and push the externality of identity management onto researchers who have to manage multiple identities in different services, or push the externality of attention management onto researchers, who have to remember to update various services and respond to a growing number of communication channels. We could certainly do better in both of those areas, but it's clear to me that when it comes to services, the framework of the marketplace does actually seem like a useful tool for understanding.

I think we're getting somewhere with this discussion, though, and I'd like to continue to think this through.