A friend is busy trying to persuade the publisher of an old-line journal to put the back issues online, and the publisher has a predictable response, albeit one that you hear less and less of these days: if I put the journal (substitute article, book, etc.) online people won’t pay for it. Variation on the theme: if you give away the cow, people won’t buy the milk.
Here is the compressed case for going online:
First, if it is true that people won’t subscribe if it is avaiable online, this surely doesn’t apply to back issues of journals, which are not part of subscriptions in any case. One—or two—issue moving walls are common and non-objectionable (though there is a strong case to be made against them as well!).
Second, there turns out to be no strong empirical support for the idea that online and offline journals are necessarily substitutes, and not complements. This long study by Jordan J. Ballor in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing makes this point. In both journals and books, the online version enhances the value of the offline version and visa versa.
Third, there is something very odd going on when a nonprofit supposedly dedicated to getting ideas out to the world decides, as a matter of policy, to withhold ideas from people pending payment when, in fact, the marginal costs of providing that information to people approaches zero, as they often do on the web. If there are large and growing revenues stemming from an offline-only system, one can see a case for the status quo, but that hardly applies to any publication nowadays. Offline-only, nonprofit publishers are losing money so they might as well try something different.
Fourth, these days, a journal without a serious web presence is threatened with extinction by irrelevance. In contrast, a journal with a large and vibrant web presence just might discover that it had previously underestimated the exent of its market. This is certainly what the Mises Institute has found. The market for libertarian and Austrian ideas does not number in the hundreds or thousands but in the hundreds of thousands and millions. In order for that potentional market to find you, you must exist in some other way than through hard-copy only.
