Re: Graphing the Bergstrom and McAfee Journal Pricing Data

[Morna Conway <mconway@infionline.net>]

Right on, Lisa!  Since when was a simple clarification judged 
argumentative, let alone an ad hominem attack? And if questioning the 
accuracy of data can be so cavalierly dismissed, perhaps we need to 
revisit the basic tenets of research.

Anyway, the point is that scholarly society-owned journals can either be 
self-published or published under contract with commercial, university 
press, or other types of publisher. Some society-sponsored journals are 
owned by the publishers that founded them. And many journals are not 
affiliated in any way with a society. Looking at the list of publishers in 
question, Blackwell probably publishes more society than proprietary 
journals; Elsevier probably publishes more proprietary than society 
journals. One thing, after many years of consulting with societies, that I 
know for a certainty is that when society journals move around from 
publisher to publisher, there is rarely a major change in institutional 
subscription price (which is still the basis of online pricing). Even when 
a commercially published society journal moves to self-publishing, the 
basic subscription rate for libraries is generally preserved.

At the heart of journal pricing is circulation, which is always higher 
when a journal goes to the members of a society than when it is published 
with the idea that a library will serve as the conduit to readers. Along 
with higher circulation come additional revenue streams, like advertising 
sales, which is one reason there is so much resistance from both societies 
and publishers to simply doing away with print. Incidentally, the paucity 
of advertising revenue in social science and humanities journals may well 
be the major contributing factor to the higher prices Phil Davis 
associates with that category.

So the B&M analysis of journal pricing does not fully capture the 
complexities of journal economics. The data needed are:

1.  Journal ownership (society or publisher)
2.  Society affiliation or not if owned by a publisher
3.  Circulation to members of society or not
4.  Other revenues available to a journal (e.g., advertising, commercial
     reprints, author fees, supplements, subsidiary rights)
5.  Publishing arrangement (self-published, commercially published,
     university press published)
6.  Number of submissions
7.  Number of accepted articles
8.  Impact factor
9.  Access policy for online version
10. COUNTER data on downloads
11. Subscription pricing
12. Site license pricing

Collect and crunch those data, and someone might begin to get at what the
realities of journal pricing are all about!

Morna Conway, Ph.D.
Journal Publishing Consultant
mconway@infionline.net



On 12/1/05 3:05 PM, "Lisa Dittrich" <lrdittrich@aamc.org> wrote:

> A couple of things:
>
> The reason I wanted to clarify the publisher issue is that if you are 
> going to say a certain publisher is, in essence, gouging librarians 
> (which seems to be the point of this exercise), then I think we should 
> have the names correct. An "ad hominem" attack would be calling the 
> researchers fat, ugly, stupid, whatever.  I was merely saying that if 
> there are flaws in one part of their research, it calls into question 
> other parts.  True scholars should be able to handle this sort of 
> question.
>
> So here's another, even more important one:  the whole concept of "for 
> profit" and "not for profit" is entirely off.  They say my journal is 
> for profit--it is not.  I pointed this out to them; they did not correct 
> it.  According to B&M, any journal published by one of the big houses is 
> "for profit."  This simply isn't true.  Many not-for-profit journals use 
> big houses to handle what they are not equipped to do:  manage 
> subscriptions, advertising sales, promotions, putting the journal 
> online, printing, mailing, etc.  This does not change their non-profit, 
> society based status.  But B&M don't make this distinction.  So all of 
> the data is skewed.
>
> Now, you could argue that the big publishers proprietary journals are 
> what make the prices overall higher in those categories--I don't know. 
> I haven't priced the proprietary journals, nor do I know their value to 
> the scholarly community.
>
> This was one of my big problems with B&M's letter in the first place, 
> and what made me question their whole premise--they simply didn't seem 
> to understand how the publishing world worked.  So when I thought they 
> also got the names of the publishers wrong, too, I thought, "who are 
> these dodos?"  Now, there's an ad hominem attack.  I've just been 
> holding back.
>
> Lisa Dittrich
> Managing Editor
> Academic Medicine
> Washington,D.C. 20037
> lrdittrich@aamc.org (e-mail)
> Academic Medicine's Web site: www.academicmedicine.org
>
>>>> Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu> 12/01/05 1:34 PM >>>
> While I respect the right of Lisa Dittrich and Morna Conway to argue about
> ownership issues and whether LWW should be grouped under Springer-Kluwer or
> separated out as a separate publisher group, I'm surprised that the
> discussion over these graphs has not taken a more comprehensive and
> comparative view.  It is hyperbolic to argue that these categorical
> disputes amount to "big errors" or that it should weaken one's "confidence
> in anything these guys are doing".   Let's not digress to ad hominem
> attacks and focus on some obvious conclusions that can be derived from the
> analysis and graphs.
>
> 1) a confirmation of large price differentials between profit and
> for-profit publishers.  This shouldn't be surprising as this merely
> confirms pricing studies over the last 25 years.
>
> 2) that some publishers (when adjusted for the number of articles they
> publish, citations they receive, or subject field) are more costly than
> others.
>
> What is surprising to me (as a librarian), is that the data suggest that
> certain commercial publishers who mainly focus on the social science and
> humanities market appear to be more costly (on a relative basis) than the
> usual STM suspects.
>
> If we are to argue the summary statistics and graphs from the Bergstrom and
> McAfee dataset, it would be more constructive to debate whether the
> measures they employ are good indicators of "value", whether they are still
> relevant in a world of big deals, or whether these data can be used to make
> generalizations about certain publishers or certain fields.
>
> --Phil Davis