08/24/2017

Revisiting: Why Technology Will Not Get Cheaper

The idea that technology is cheap persists despite abundant evidence to the contrary

Editor’s Note: The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article on the struggles libraries are facing with digital infrastructure costs, which included this quote:

“In the beginning, we all thought, everything is going online, it will save us a ton of money. But that’s not true. Now that’s pretty widely understood.”

It brought to mind Kent Anderson’s post from last year on why digital publishing is so expensive, and why we shouldn’t expect that to change any time soon (also worth revisiting, Kent’s earlier pieces on the costs of keeping your systems up to date and on accounting for technology costs). Meanwhile, the RA21 projectpromises much needed upgrades in authentication and user experience, but these will also likely come with their own costs. We sit in a precarious position, trying to respond to demands for new and better ways to present information while regularly being told that prices are too high and that libraries don’t have any money. This may be leading us further down the path to market consolidation, as the largest and most profitable publishers are best suited to absorbing these extra costs, while the smaller publisher with lesser margins may not be able to keep up.

A core conceit behind the new information economy is that delivering content becomes much cheaper when the content is in digital form. This conceit has informed, and continues to inform, a lot of thinking, from how publishers charge to what it should cost to host or launch a journal online. A lot of price sensitivity stems from the assumption that digital is cheaper than print. Recently, eLife was caught in up in its own financial contortions around technology costs, shoving aside capital expenditures in order to demonstrate lower per-article charges despite the fact that both need to be paid for, no matter your financial sleight of hand.

Please click here to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.