Re: Libraries Urge Justice Departmen to Block Cinven and Candover Purchase of BertelsmannSpringer

["Mary Munroe" <C60MHM1@wpo.cso.niu.edu>]

Nothing in the research I have done on mergers and acquisitions in the
publishing industry has shown that the quality of the products in the
industry is better, that the management of the firms is better, or that
customer service is better.  The only thing that seems better is the stock
price, and as we have seen in the last year or so, even that is not
certain.

On the contrary, customer service suffers from the merger of different
organizational cultures, the products suffer from the lack of attention to
editorial quality, and the management suffers when "professional" managers
replace people who care about the product.

This does not even cover the problems created by an anti-competitive
atmosphere.  Scholarly publishing needs to go back to being scholarly --
run by the people who produce the scholarship.  And that, of course, leads
back to the disfunction in the promotion and tenure process at
universities.  It is past time that we stopped bemoaning the situation and
went to work to make things like SPARC really work on a much larger scale
than has been true until now.

Mary Munroe