In the December Information Today, Richard Poynder interviews Mark McCabe on problems in the STM journal publishing industry. Quoting McCabe: "Let's be clear: We are talking about a true market failure. This is a market in which the creation of the information that publishers sell in their journals is not typically funded by them but by subsidies from someone else—be it governments, research foundations, or whatever. The publishers get that information for free and then rely on scholars to provide refereeing services, essentially for free. In the digital environment, the only thing publishers need to provide is the infrastructure for providing the material online, a few account managers, and advertising. They make a relatively small investment and then (rationally) charge a high price for the end product."
Poynder asked what governments should do. McCabe's reply: "Well, antitrust enforcement alone is not going to fix this market. However, given that governments fund much of this research in the first place—and then pay the publishers to get it back in journal form—I think organizations like the National Science Foundation ought to invest some of their funds in a new journal initiative. This could be designed to provide money for people to start dozens, if not hundreds, of competitive nonprofit journals....Like SPARC, but on a much larger scale. The savings could be tremendous. Billions of dollars are spent on these journals, most of which is going into shareholders' pockets. While this is a good thing for the shareholders, it is a bad thing for society because there is no reason why research—whether it is funded by European or American governments—should not be at the fingertips of every individual who has access to the Internet. Bear in mind also that in this market—unlike most markets—the nonprofit sector does a better job than commercial publishers in almost all dimensions of performance."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/09/2002 10:48:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
