Publishers - your thoughts on jobs for your authors and reviewers?

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris@sfu.ca>]

This quote from Graham Taylor, director of academic publishing at 
the Publishers Association, just came to my attention:  "The only 
way for universities to save money is to make people redundant," 
From:  Jump, P. (2010)  Pay out then priced out: bid to rein in 
high journal costs Times Higher Education: 
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=414106

Considering that the focus of this article is reining in high 
journal costs, I am not sure how this quote could be interested 
as saying another other than that  publishers are quite happy to 
see jobs at universities cut to retain profit levels. This could 
mean loss of academic positions - the very authors and reviewers 
who provide the work for scholarly journals, for free. Or it 
could mean loss of support staff positions, which would impact 
the workload of academics. Or perhaps this means librarians - the 
publishers' customers and partners?

Question for publishers: is this a common view? Go ahead and push 
the people who do the work for us for free out on the street, 
just don't lay a finger on our profit margins? Given the 
austerity measures that have taken place in recent years, it 
seems highly likely that at the very least some of the academic 
authors and reviewers are now literally doing the work for free, 
on furlough without the benefit of the academic salaries enjoyed 
in the past.

Thanks to David Prosser for the pointer to this quote:  Prosser, 
D. C. (2011). Reassessing the value proposition: First steps 
towards a fair(er) price for scholarly journals. Serials, 24(1), 
60-63.

Thoughts?

best,

Heather G. Morrison
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of 
Communication
http://www.cmns.sfu.ca/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com