RE: Monopolies (was Elsevier profit)

[Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>]

Harvey,

I appreciate what you say, but the for-profit/not-for-profit distinction
is perhaps not as relevant as it seems, in my view. There are for-profits
as well as not-for-profits that play the monopoly card in terms of
maximising revenues, as there are for-profits as well as not-for-profits
who favour a truly competitive environment. The stakeholders of
not-for-profits (mostly societies) are of course not shareholders, but
they may nonetheless exert similar pressure on governing boards to make as
much money as possible, to be spent on causes deemed worthy by the
scholarly society in question. It would be good if societies were to have
the discussion whether that is a desirable state of affairs or not.

You are right, libraries cannot just walk away from monopolies.
Unfortunately. The nature of monopolies is that they have power over their
customers. But that doesn't mean they cannot do anything, though the
choice is frankly quite stark. Either one is prepared to stick out one's
neck and works towards a system more suitable to scholarly communication
and fairer, too, or one accepts the monopolies and small circulations/high
prices that go with it.

With regard to your suggestion of governments dictating where to publish,
I don't think that will work. What governments and other funding bodies
could do, however, is to make sure and clear that proposals for funding
are judged on the basis of the merits of the individual papers in the CVs
of researchers putting them forward (and not, as a shortcut, on the basis
of the impact factors of the established journals they were published in),
and that at least a preference is expressed on the part of the funder that
the research results be freely available when published. That would take
away some of the perceived biases in favour of established monopoloid
journals and give new, open access journals a chance to build up prestige
of their own (prestige being, after all, quality 'multiplied' by time).

Best regards,

Jan Velterop

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harvey Brenneise [mailto:HBrenne@MPHI.org]
> Sent: 29 March 2003 05:56
> To: 'liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu'
> Subject: RE: Elsevier profit
> 
> 
> Jan, I agree that it's about economics.  However, one should not forget
> that there are and have been for a long time quite a number of non-profit
> publishers of journals who are under no pressure at all to create profits
> for shareholders.  Many of these are in disciplines where there is no
> "funding pressure" (such as the humanities) to pay for increases in price
> that are unrelated to change in cost of production.  But it is difficult
> for libraries to walk away from the monopolies, and so they are caught.
> Frankly, if the US Government simply dictated that all research resulting
> from federal grants had to be freely available to the public who paid for
> it would put a big hole in publisher monopolies.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Harvey Brenneise
> Michigan Public Health Institute