No interest in efficiency???

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@worldnet.att.net>]

I must take exception to Mr. Rowland's remark:

>In the *scholarly* publishing industry - where every product is a
>monopoly, and he who pays the piper (libraries) does not call the tune
>(authors do) - the usual competitive pressures towards greater efficiency
>may not apply.

JE:  While it may be true for some organizations in the not-for-profit
scholarly publishing arena, where staffing levels are often very high, the
pressure for efficiencies in the commercial sector are so great that they
could make you scream--and they often do.  Managers are put through an
annual drill to reduce costs, cut turnaround times, etc., and to get
approval for any kind of new investment, including for new product
features (such as, for example, creating an online version of a journal)
is so daunting that few bother.  

*This is why established commercial publishers are not innovative.* The
features that get added, that some would say are unnecessary and drive up
costs, get added because the marketplace demands them and products don't
sell if the demands of the marketplace are not met. This is true in
research journals (gratuitous inclusion of abstracts and indexes in a
world of full-text searching), college textbooks (costly four-color
printing and Web auxiliary material for something as basic as an
introduction to calculus), and reference books (thumb-indexing of
dictionaries, my personal bete noire from when I ran Merriam-Webster).
Readers of this list will disagree with some of the parenthetical examples
cited here, and that precisely is the problem: all these features get
built in. But this is not because of a lack of efficiency but because of
what it means to get a customer to say yes.

As for the use of the word "monopoly", well, the term is more meaningfully
applied to a business, not a product.  The competition in publishing
largely takes place at the time of product acquisition (what journals
should we publish?  how do we get the best editors?), and at that point
the competition is simply brutal.  A "product monopoly" is really a
misnomer. I suppose the coffee cup on my desk is a monopoly of sorts, as
only I get to use it.

But the proof is in the pudding:  If "defeatured" publications are what
the marketplace really wants, publish some.  See what happens.  We read so
much today about how inexpensive it is to publish journals, were it not
for the ham-fisted, greedy ignoramuses who run publishing companies, that
we should all simply run out, start our own journals, and show John Wiley
how it should be done.

Joe Esposito