Andrew Odlyzko has self-archived "Open Access, Library and Publisher Competition, and the Evolution of General Commerce."
Here's an excerpt:
Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in this market. Publishers, through the oft-reviled "Big Deal" packages, are providing much greater and more egalitarian access to the journal literature, an approximation to true Open Access. In the process they are also marginalizing libraries, and obtaining a greater share of the resources going into scholarly communication. This is enabling a continuation of publisher profits as well as of what for decades has been called "unsustainable journal price escalation." It is also inhibiting the spread of Open Access, and potentially leading to an oligopoly of publishers controlling distribution through large-scale licensing.
| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography (paperback, PDF file, and XHTML website; over 1,100 entries) | Digital Scholarship |
