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

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> 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...

Well, right.  So then why do we complain about Elsevier so much?  Why does
it matter how many journal publishers there are?  I really don't see how
you can have this argument both ways -- if Elsevier's dominance is a
problem, then we should welcome the emergence of another big player; if it
isn't, then we should stop fussing about it.  Heck, maybe all scholarly
journals should be published by a single house, thus immensely simplifying
the life of my serials staff.

> 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.

But that competition persists as long as there are individual journals,
regardless of who owns them.  LCATS and Serials Review are both Elsevier
journals, but Carol Diedrichs and Connie Foster have to compete for good
writers the same way they would if the two journals came from different
houses.

-------------
Rick Anderson
Director of Resource Acquisition
The University Libraries            "Perfect clarity is the
University of Nevada, Reno           ultimate style. A sentence
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rickand@unr.edu