Re: PLOS article metrics

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris@sfu.ca>]

On 22-Sep-09, at 7:39 PM, Joseph Esposito wrote:

As authors and publishers become more aware of the value in 
driving up usage statistics, they will engage in more and more 
SEM and often SEO.  Thus the competition for the 'best' article 
becomes entangled with the efforts of aggressive marketing. 
Authors and publishers who are less skilled at this will be left 
behind; the more skillful will invest greater and greater 
resources in SEM, driving up costs.

HM - Two comments:

1.  This is an excellent argument for eliminating the for-profit
    sector from scholarly publishing.  As things stand, some of
    the mega- publishers are already taking in profit margins of
    30% or higher; once you add in taxes, that's at least 50% of
    revenue spent without a dime going to anything having to do
    with scholarship.  That's not even taking into account sales,
    lobbying, etc.!  Add to this even more money going to
    aggressive marketing, and the percentage of the academic
    library budget that actually goes to scholarly aims will be
    very small indeed.

2.  If some publishers take this approach and it drives up costs,
    they won't stand a chance of competing on a per-article basis
    with more efficient publishers, like PLoS - or almost any
    society not-for-profit.

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com