All of us.
By this I mean a distinct thing: the economics of pre-OA publishing
make books $$-valuable. So if the publisher generously spreads a few
free copies around to journals and we in turn offer them to reviewers,
reviewers are glad to get the books and happy to write the review in
return. We get the review quid for the publisher's quo. That's an
economic transaction deeply embedded in the "commercial" model of
things. We *all* benefit from that because we all get to read the
book reviews, and a certain number of us get nice free books.
At BMCR, we have repeatedly experimented with getting reviews for
"non-commercial" resources, chiefly sophisticated web resources
available for free on the open net. The take-up by would-be reviewers
is statistically indistinguishable from zero. So nobody gets a "free
book" and nobody at all gets to read a review of that resource.
My point is only that the social embeddedness of the current system is
intricate and has many benefits as well as many costs.
jo'd
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