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

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Adding a "big" Springer to the mix doesn't really create "competition".  

Experience of the last 70 years or so demonstrates repeatedly that
journals do not compete in the traditional economic sense. They are not
fungibile, exchangeable. You can go buy a different hair spray or
dishwashing detergent. You cannot substitute one journal for another,
though you may be able to drop one and add another if
faculty/institutions/researchers change fields.

If an institution or researcher needs specific content nothing will
substitute except access on demand. The journal model prohibits individual
articles finding their own market, as the articles are all priced by the
pound, so to speak. Without the ability to switch products, change buying
behavior for another equally good or better product there is no
competitive market. Without multiple access streams to products, different
distrbution streams, not controlled by oligopolistic companies there is no
possiblity of competition. There is continued consolidation,a s when the
biggest winner in a marbles game gets all the other marbles.

The only competition that I am aware of is in the drive for the best
papers, the best names writing for a particular journal or group of
journals. That competition is quite different than the normal marketplace,
and is why the wait and let the market take care of it approach has never
worked in the STM journal world.

That piece, the machinery of editors, names, papers, specializations, the
care and feeding of scholars and their systems, conferences, etc.  is what
Springer has in several areas and Cinven and Candover would have to be
very foolish indeed to destroy the Springer infrastructure of finding and
developing and sustaining disciplines.  Commercial publishers have been
doing this task which-in many ways they invented in the early part of the
last century. This process is almost absent in discussion of what creates
and maintains journal systems. They are as any social system, webs of
loyalty, respect, practice, habit-and each is uniquely built by people-in
house editors they are sometimes called. If they are good (and Springer
and Elsevier and other commercial publishers, have staff who devote full
time to this task) you and I see the results in "must have" journals.

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