Academic Publisher Fights Publication Of Paper Criticizing Publishers' Price Increases And Profits | Techdirt

"The world of academic publishing is highly profitable -- and, apparently, highly sustainable. There's no shortage of content seeking publication as researchers, professors, etc. seek to have their work published and cited. Handing even more power over to publishers by linking publication with tenure, universities have sabotaged their own interests by giving academic publishers every reason to increase subscription rates. It's not as though this has gone unnoticed. Backlash against exorbitant access fees withholding publicly-funded research from the public led to a boycott of Elsevier unless it withdrew its support of the Research Works Act, which sought to lock up even more academic works. Though more than 30,000 scientists joined the boycott (and Elsevier withdrew its support of the Act), little has changed in the academic publishing world. A group of UK academics tried to bring this debate to the publishers last year via a proposition paper that criticized the steadily increasing prices of publications, only to have it stonewalled and censored by academic publisher Taylor & Francis ... The full paper is embedded below and, as you can see, Taylor & Francis have helpfully time-stamped it with my IP address.   The paper compares publishers with the music industry, noting that the latter saw surging sales once it began pricing its offerings more realistically. It also posits that less strenuous infringement countermeasures could help push prices down. But most damningly, it examines the rates charged by publishers, comparing those of for-profit entities with those of non-profits ... The more widely-cited a journal is, the more likely it is to be published on a larger-scale (reducing costs) and the more desirable it is as a destination for submissions (lowering costs yet again). With this desirability comes the privilege of increasing prices, something for-profit publishers aren't exactly shy about doing.   But this generates expenses for other entities who aren't part of this self-sustaining feedback loop, often causing them to cannibalize related services to the detriment of the schools themselves ... Needless to say, Taylor & Francis wasn't interested in publishing a critique of its business model. So, it stalled the publication of this article for several months. (It was originally due to be published September 2013.) ..."