Re: the Yale argument on open-choice

[Peter Banks <pbanks@bankspub.com>]

Sandy is absolutely right. You merely have to compare the average 
nonprofit journal subscription price with the average 
corresponding for-profit to see that nonprofits have deliberately 
NOT chosen to maximize their revenues (look at Bergstrom's data 
at journalprices.com, for example). Most nonprofits strike a 
balance between keeping subscription prices low to enhance the 
dissemination of information, yet high enough to support 
educational and research activities crucial to the association's 
mission.

Peter Banks
Banks Publishing
Publications Consulting and Services
Fairfax, VA 22030
pbanks@bankspub.com
www.bankspub.com
www.associationpublisher.com/blog/


On 3/22/07 6:13 PM, "Sandy Thatcher" <sgt3@psu.edu> wrote:

> Why do you just assume that all non-profit publishers "will 
> charge as much as they can in order to maximize their 
> revenues"? I can't speak for society publishers, but this is 
> clearly not true for university presses. If it were, the prices 
> of our journals and books would have risen much faster over the 
> last forty years than they have, I assure you. As parts of 
> universities, presses are driven by other imperatives than pure 
> revenue-maximization.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State Press
>
>> Is it not clear, though, hat price inflation is an
>> expectedconsequence of the subscription model?
>>
>> If the research community hands over ownership/exclusive
>> rightsto publishers, it is economically predictable that
>> publishers(whether commercial or not-for-profit) will charge as
>> much asthey can in order to maximize their revenues. Given that
>> theacademic community *really* needs access to that research,
>> thereis virtually no upper bound on what publishers with enough
>> marketpower can get away with charging for subscriptions . The
>> naturalsolution to this is surely for the research community
>> *not* togive away the ownership/exclusive rights to the
>> research.
>>
>> Under an open access publishing model, you immediately have
>> amuch more effective market. The customer (the research
>> community)can choose the publication service that offers the
>> best value,ensuring that prices are kept down. This kind
>> of'substitutability' generally doesn't exist with the
>> subscriptionmodel - hence the problem of journal inflation.
>>
>> Matt Cockerill
>> BioMed Central