RE: journal and publication costs, corrected figures

[espositoj@att.net]

I wouldn't have thought so.  I would have thought that the problems lie in
the way academic work is certified and how academics themselves are
credentialled.  The current situation stimulates massive overproduction of
materials (though I suppose one man's overproduction is another's riches
of civilization), which makes the filtering or winnowing process
essential.  This is the primary value publishers add to the process.  
They certify work through the strength of their imprimaturs, whose
strength in turn derives from a history of selecting good editors,
establishing trade relations, and so forth.  See the recent Morgan Stanley
report on Reed Elsevier's economic prospects (I don't have the citation on
this hard drive).

A solution?  Sure.  Eliminating copyright will only make the problem
worse; you can just see the executives at Reed Elsevier rubbing their
palms together everytime Stevan Harnad posts a squib about self-archiving.  
More content makes the publisher's imprimatur all the more valuable.  I'm
a publisher myself and, trust me, the "information-wants-to-be-free"
movement is to a publisher what a change in the tax code (preferably a
"simplification")is to the accounting industry. You can't print the money
fast enough to take advantage of all the economic opportunities that are
opening up.  To "fix" the situation all--all-- that would be necessary is
for authors to stop writing for attribution.  That's the key:  reduce the
personal incentives for people to attempt to publish research in the first
place.  Genuine scholarship would still get written and published because
not all motivation is venal.  The pressure on library budgets would
disappear.  I'm sure for some, though, fixing the problem by denying
authors credit is akin to fixing a dog.

Joe Esposito
espositoj@att.net

> Quite. But isn't that exactly what's wrong with the conventional model for
> research publishing?
> 
> Jan Velterop
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: espositoj@att.net
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Sent: 1/18/03 12:30 AM
> Subject: Re: journal and publication costs, corrected figures
> 
> If it were true that journals were indeed priced by the article, there
> might be something to this analysis, but journals are not priced that way,
> any more than music CDs are priced by the song.  Nor are they priced as a
> strict function of cost.  They are (mostly) priced as a function of
> several factors, including costs, risk, invested capital, and market
> opportunity.  The biggest expense is in finding customers--call this
> marketing--which is very difficult in a world that is awash in published
> research.
> 
> Joe Esposito