Interview with Stuart Shieber

"there is a systemic market failure in the scholarly publishing market. I think it’s well understood why that failure occurred. The standard business model for journals is that a publisher receives exclusive rights, typically in the form of transfer of copyright. They can then monetize those rights by selling access to subscribers. That is how it has worked for decades now. The symptoms of market failure include inelasticity of demand, and a persistent hyperinflation of those rates. Another symptom of market failure is huge price disparities: The subscription price per page for commercial journals is about six times the price per page of non-profit journals. Looking at cost per citation of an article shows the difference even more starkly. The commercial journal cost per citation is 16 times higher than the non-profits. Such price disparities can only persist in a dysfunctional market....The whole point of writing articles in academia is so others can read them. Researchers were writing articles at Harvard and other institutions and fewer and fewer people could read them as academic libraries canceled their subscriptions....The open access policies are intended to address the symptom of the underlying problem, the reduction in access to scholarly articles. But it doesn’t address the underlying problem itself, which is the market failure in the prevailing business model for journals. Trying to address this market failure is a much harder nut to crack, because now we are looking at the business models publishers use to underwrite their journals...."