Re: "subsidy"

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Hmm, we are used to using that term in scholarly publishing 
without its having that kind of connotation. E.g., we talk of 
applying for a publication subvention or subsidy to the NEH 
(before its program, which used that name, stopped in the 
mid-1990s) or to foundations like Getty or to funds like the 
Meiss Fund at College Art. We speak of a university providing an 
"operating subsidy" to its press. There is nothing remotely 
suggesting any negative attitude here, certainly nothing that 
connotes "vanity" publishing. Peer review is conducted apart from 
financial assessment of need for a subsidy. I therefore felt 
little compunction about referring to journal surpluses as 
cross-subsidizing monograph publishing, which for most presses 
loses money. Other presses try to create these surpluses through 
publishing trade or regional or reference books. We believe in 
the books as much as we believe in these other forms of 
publishing; indeed, in some cases, we wouldn't even have ventured 
into these other arenas but for the need to cross-subsidize, 
since the operating subsidies most universities have provided 
have not themselves sufficed to make up for the losses of 
monograph publishing. I think whatever taint the word "subsidy" 
might have acquired in some quarters is undeserved, and indeed 
seriously misleading, in reference to monograph publishing.

Sandy Thatcher


At 10:19 PM -0400 3/19/11, James J. O'Donnell wrote:

>I wrote to Joe off-line that his post made me realize that 
>"subsidy" is a highly loaded term that means "investment that I 
>don't approve of and want to see stopped".  If a restaurant 
>makes its money off the liquor, you don't say the liquor 
>subsidizes the food, because you believe in the food.  If you 
>stop believing in the food (if it's all chicken wings and you're 
>really in the bar business) then you think differently.  The 
>high-revenue passengers on an airplane and the low-revenue ones 
>are just there because of a pricing model, but you don't say 
>that the first class passengers subsidize the folks in steerage 
>-- unless you're agitating for a different pricing model. Think 
>on it, but my surmise that the choice to use that word is a sign 
>that something is shaky in the underlying value proposition and 
>the speaker knows it.  (I'm part of the oldest completely open 
>access journal in the humanities, Bryn Mawr Classical Review. 
>We pay the bills with revenues from another publishing venture. 
>We've never used the word "subsidize" in our in-house 
>conversations about it; BMCR is an opportunity that we seized 
>because we had a way to pay for it and we're glad we do it.)
>
>Jim O'Donnell
>Georgetown U.
>
>Sandy Thatcher wrote:
>
>I used to say that the "surplus" we made on publishing journals
>at Penn State Press helped subsidize the publication of
>monographs. How would you analyze that, Joe?
>
>Sandy Thatcher