Publishers collectively invest hundreds of millions of dollars to publish and disseminate peer-reviewed journals and make profits by selling print and online subscriptions — and sometimes individual articles — for up to hundreds of dollars a year.
in Publishers mobilize against US research proposal via Should government-funded research be free?
up to hundreds of dollars a year, yeah right… Dude, we’re talking of up to $20,000 – and sometimes more – for a single subscription. The Big Ones [Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, Springer, Wiley, etc] charge through the nose for access to their publications. Even non-profit organizations like ACS make a tidy profit from their sales of paper and online subs. And then third parties [and some publishers too, like Scopus, launched in late 2004 by Elsevier] provide cross-publisher search engines and even online subscription services [imagine Google and Amazon all rolled up in one], for a fee, of course!
So, if the high price was in the hundreds, it wouldn’t yield you much profit – even if the raw material comes for free; after all, academics would pay to publish! It’s not like academics are selling their articles, and publishers recouping their costs… In Korea, where the bulk of my experience comes from, the average sub price [paper only] was above $1,000, and this included the cheapo theology and litterature publications. A large university’s serial publications budget hovered above $/€800,000, with larger ones reaching 1.5 million $/€.
About 70 percent of a typical article’s usage value occurs after six months, Crawford said, citing independent librarian research and publishers’ own accounts.
Well this bit is a tad disingenuous, considering that most academic publishers have been pushing very hard in the last few years the sales of PDF subs, while slapping overzealous client libraries that let their students scripts – or did it themselves – that batch-downloaded PDFs as soon as they were published… I remember a non-profit org we were representing in Korea complaining about KESLI – the Korean org that negotiates online subs for their members – being their first downloader, and not paying enough for it. The aggregated fee KESLI members paid to this non-profit org was above 100,000$.
This is just a bad case of an easy money scheme being threatened by external forces. There are already initiatives by academics to self-publish their research in a more organized way than the traditional isolated web page in a dark corner of the web. But against giant publishers, what can they do really? So without a regulating body putting pressure on publishers, it’s not going to happen.
FWIW, the main distribution agents, Ebsco and Swets, clocked together around 2 billion eurodollars in 2005 – selling subs. Of course, most of this cashflow goes back to the publishers, as the figures are made of 80%+ subscription prices, the rest being split between shipping, handling and the agents margin.
