RE: Monopolies in publishing

[jmcdonald@library.caltech.edu]

"Unless journal publishers can achieve breakthrough cost reductions, many
academic journals will cease to exist, thereby reducing the number of
outlets for publishing research work."

While you're right that academic journals are under greater pressure to
succeed, it's not due to the search for breakthrough cost reductions.  
It's due to the increasing outlets for publishing academic research.  As
already discussed on the list, new publishing ventures, preprint servers,
author self-publishing, institutional repositories, and other innovative
publishing outlets are growing rapidly and their use by, and acceptance
by, academic researchers is growing as rapidly.

Authors are becoming much more aware of the financial limitations of their
institutional libraries and are choosing more fiscally responsible outlets
for publishing their work.  Authors of scientific research want their work
to be as accessible and as widely distributed as possible, and are less
accepting of the bad pricing policies of the large monopolistic publishing
houses.

The cessation of low quality journals produced by commercial publishers is
a good thing.  Authors still publishing in those journals were poorly
served by the publishers in the first place and will seek other avenues
where they can publish their research.

John McDonald
Acquisitions Librarian
California Institute of Technology


-----Original Message-----
From: D Anderson [mailto:danderson@corhealth.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 3:27 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Monopolies in publishing 

Our perception as a publisher is that serious efforts are being made by
publishers to drag editors into the 21st century, technology-wise.
Regarding the statement that publishers have little incentive to pass cost
savings on to customers, that depends on the publisher's business
strategy.

Periodical publishers have seen drops in subscriptions with every price
increase. They know that price increases fuel further drops in
subscriptions and that unless this cycle is stopped, they'll be out of
business (and lots of journals will disappear.)

Publishers with a long-term view therefore have a strong incentive to keep
subscription prices stable. On the other hand, publishers with a shorter
term view may choose to simply milk the market for all they can get before
the market runs dry.

Our view is that the consolidation in the academic journal sector, like
consolidation in other industries, reflects a business model moving from a
mature phase to a declining one. Subscriber bases are shrinking, not
growing. Unless journal publishers can achieve breakthrough cost
reductions, many academic journals will cease to exist, thereby reducing
the number of outlets for publishing research work.

Dean H. Anderson
COR Health

COR Health
Insight ... not just news
http://www.corhealth.com

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