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van Der Wurff's Article

I just read an article. "It argues that competition and concentration stimulate differentiation, whereas they have opposite effects on prices. Second, economies of scale and demand conditions determine that differentiated magazines provide focused and distinctive content at high subscription prices to small audiences. General-content magazines, in contrast, provide diverse information to large audiences at low subscription prices. Differentiation is therefore only feasible if audiences are willing to pay high subscription prices. Finally, commercial and non-commercial publishers adopt different strategies." van der Wurff, Richard. "Business Magazine Market Performance: Magazines for the Agricultural, Business Services, and Transportation Sectors in the Netherlands," JOURNAL OF MEDIA ECONOMICS. 18(2), p 143-159. It did include general magazines that accepts advertising, not just scholarly journals. Among other issues, he gives reasons why publishers prices increase as the specialization of topics increase. It implies a solution to lowering the subscription costs are not to jump on all the new differentiated titles. Maybe some consolidations of titles will lighten the price inflation.

Hamaker, Chuck wrote:

Lisa Dittrich said:
"So here's another, even more important one: the whole concept of "for profit" and "not for profit" is entirely off. They say my journal is for profit--it is not. I pointed this out to them; they did not correct it. According to B&M, any journal published by one of the big houses is "for profit." This simply isn't true. Many not-for-profit journals use big houses to handle what they are not equipped to do: manage subscriptions, advertising sales, promotions, putting the journal online, printing, mailing, etc. This does not change their non-profit, society based status. But B&M don't make this distinction. So all of the data is skewed."
Lisa, I don't know what your overall experience is with commercials and society publications.

For all practical purposes (tracking inflation, base price, and other measures) society journals in commercial publisher packages behave very much like wholly owned commercial journals. I've recently had the opportunity to learn about a publisher making an offer to a society to publish its journals and the pricing proposal was if memory serves, about 4 times what the society was charging. SPARC has more information on this type of issue which has been played out repeatedly over the last 30 or so years and contributes to the overall reasons for "lumping" not for profits published by commercials in with the other commercial titles. If your not for profit journal managed to keep the base price different than what the commercial publisher is doing generally or is able to keep inflationary price increases below the norm, then great, but its not what libraries have generally experienced when not for profit journals are published by commercial operations. Elsevier, for example, publishes many society and association titles, but I'm not aware of any study demonstrating differential pricing behavior from their other titles. I did a small study in the 80's that we didn't publish that showed that the society/association titles in Elsevier behaved price-wise like the wholly owned titles.

I'm surprised given the last 20 years of the history of journal pricing studies that there are still society and association publishers that don't recognize that commercial publishers behave differently and have significantly different goals in terms of return even when publishing those societies' titles.

What's surprising in the data is that Elsevier and Blackwell's are trending differently than they have been, i.e. they are no longer the absolute leaders of the pack in pricing/value outliers. For example in price per citation they are middling now.

What I find interesting is that Sage and Taylor and Francis show up as almost outliers, and the why of that question is important. I don't think its because of the nature of what the publish, as Phil I think suggested, but more likely because of the heavy growth they've both undergone over the last few years. Perhaps large stable publishers are able to spread costs and even out over their published titles to show somewhat more orderly behavior (i.e. Blackwells and Elsevier) where growing publishers rapidly bringing new titles into their stable of publications show higher rates of behaviors that are worrisome. Makes me wonder what the growth rates for Elsevier looked like in the 70's and 80's. Was the aggressive and destructive pricing behavior the result of growing organizations that literally didn't know enough about their new titles? Is rapid growth or publisher consolidation dangerous to the pricing structure libraries experience from publishers?

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223