Re: PLOS article metrics

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I'm afraid Heather is not well informed.  The pressures 
commercial organizations are under to bring their publications to 
the attention of a readership are the same as those experienced 
by not-for-profit publishers, including open access publishers.

Joe Esposito


On 9/23/09 2:33 PM, "Heather Morrison" <hgmorris@sfu.ca> wrote:

> On 22-Sep-09, at 7:39 PM, Joseph Esposito wrote:
>
> As authors and publishers become more aware of the value in
> driving up usage statistics, they will engage in more and more
> SEM and often SEO.  Thus the competition for the 'best' article
> becomes entangled with the efforts of aggressive marketing.
> Authors and publishers who are less skilled at this will be left
> behind; the more skillful will invest greater and greater
> resources in SEM, driving up costs.
>
> HM - Two comments:
>
> 1.  This is an excellent argument for eliminating the for-profit
>     sector from scholarly publishing.  As things stand, some of
>     the mega- publishers are already taking in profit margins of
>     30% or higher; once you add in taxes, that's at least 50% of
>     revenue spent without a dime going to anything having to do
>     with scholarship.  That's not even taking into account sales,
>     lobbying, etc.!  Add to this even more money going to
>     aggressive marketing, and the percentage of the academic
>     library budget that actually goes to scholarly aims will be
>     very small indeed.
>
> 2.  If some publishers take this approach and it drives up costs,
>     they won't stand a chance of competing on a per-article basis
>     with more efficient publishers, like PLoS - or almost any
>     society not-for-profit.
>
> Heather Morrison, MLIS
> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com