Re: On the distinction between for-profit and non-profit

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>]

Early last year, Andrew Braid of the British Library looked at the figures 
from Ulrich's.  when inactive titles were excluded, the number of active 
or forthcoming peer-reviewed journals listed came down to 21,122.  Of 
these, those with the word 'society, association, institute or 
institution' in the publisher field numbered 6,793;  a further 2,441 had 
the word 'university' - 9,234 in all, or nearly half.

This is likely, however, to be an underestimate of those actually 
published by not-for-profit organisations - it does not include equivalent 
terms in languages other than English;  nor other types of NFP publisher - 
charities, inter-governmental organisations, research institutes and the 
like;  nor does it include journals owned by societies etc, and published 
under contract by third parties.

It would be very interesting (but difficult!) to dig a little deeper and 
come up with a more definitive figure, but it does seem clear that at 
least half, and possibly considerably more, of all journals are published 
by or for NFP organisations.  And given that even the largest NFP 
publishers are very much smaller than the largest commercial ones, it 
probably also means that there are many more NFP publishers than 
commercial.

I also looked (earlier this year) at the top-ranked ISI titles and it is 
interesting to look at the percentage of nonprofit titles:

69% of the top 500 are NFP
70% of the top 400
73% of the top 300
74% of the top 200
77% of the top 100
85% of the top 20
80% of the top 10

While I fully concede that ISI rankings are not the only measure of 
quality, they are certainly one...

For what the difference actually is, see the article I wrote some time ago 
entitled 'What's so special about not-for-profit publishers?' 
(http://puck.ingentaconnect.com/vl=6194886/cl=59/nw=1/rpsv/cgi-bin/linker?ini=alpsp&reqidx=/cw/alpsp/09531513/v14n3/s1/p163)

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Velterop" <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 11:58 PM
Subject: On the distinction between for-profit and non-profit

> In the discussion about the McAfee and Bergstrom data the issue of 
> profit versus non-profit featured repeatedly. It is my impression that 
> far more journals are for profit than is apparent in that dataset. There 
> is nothing wrong with being for profit, of course, and many of the 
> journals labelled 'non-profit' aim to have a financial surplus. I call 
> that a profit. Their owners/publishers may be not-for- profit, but that 
> only means that they don't have to pay tax and that the surplus 
> generated has, by law, to be spent in a certain way or ploughed back 
> into the organisation. It doesn't mean that the journals work on a pure 
> cost-recovery basis. Should we know which journals price their 
> subscriptions on a pure cost-recovery basis, without profit or surplus, 
> then we might have something to distinguish them in meaningful 
> categories of this sort.
>
> Jan Velterop