Some interesting statistics from Oxford University Press about the reaction to their open access experiment for publication in the journals they publish. In essence they offer authors whose research has been accepted for publication the option of paying £1500 (or £800 if their institution already subscribes to the online version of the journal in question) to have their paper made available absolutely free to anyone in the world. Open access is being encouraged by a number of research-funding organisations and this 'mixed-economy' response is clever. OUP benefit from being seen to be scholar-friendly, they earn money from the author fees, they encourage institutional subscriptions and they still retain the vast bulk of their subscription income. They are also seen to be transparent in publishing the results of the experiment widely. However, none of this answers the fundamental question of why paying for publication is likely to result in better scientific literature than the existing subscriber sytem. Time will tell and it's great to see practical experimentation rather than hypothetical debate.

From some interesting experimental findings to a report documenting the 'bleeding obvious'. Google have discovered that 16% of visitors to the Google BookSearch web page then move on to a bookshop site (Amazon, WHS etc). Well, shiver my timbers. Who would have thought that some of the people who visited a book page on Google might have wanted to see more about the book and perhaps even buy it? Much more interesting is why on earth the remaining 84% did not visit an online bookshop.

At a dinner last night I was asked what the successful British TV show, Richard and Judy, could do to encourage even more new writing and enjoyment of literature. Their book club has been enormously successful in every way and it was really hard to see how they could do better what they already do. But there is one thing. They could invite their millions of viewers to visit their local public library and demand that the library stocks more books, particularly those by new authors. Libraries seem to have been hijacked by some politicians as out-reach centres or IT retraining camps. Libraries are there for readers and for books. Richard and Judy could be a huge force for good if they marshalled their troops accordingly. They could start by asking how much the library service has spent on management consultants, PwC, compared with their book purchasing budget over the last few years. Libraries are very definitely open access (see above) but there's no point having open access if the choice of books is limited and inappropriate.