Scholarly publishing: why not co-operatives? | Impact of Social Sciences

"I’m a member of The Co-operative Group. The group, which is the UK’s largest mutual business, is owned  by its customers – over 6 million of them.* The Co-op runs grocery stores, pharmacies, and travel agents and provides a range of services, including childcare, funeral services, and legal services. Each year I receive a dividend payment representing my share of the profits, calculated in proportion to the amount that I have spent as a Co-op customer. In a recent article about the survival (indeed, growth) of the Co-op in the recession, The Economist magazine makes an interesting point about the appeal of the Co-op’s funeral care business. Generally, consumers have limited knowledge about funeral costs. When bereaved, they don’t want to stress of having to research such costs. Equally, they don’t want to be ripped off. The Co-op provides consumers in this position with a solution: the risk of being ripped off is mitigated by the fact that the Co-op’s owners, as themselves customers, have little incentive to (as it were) rip themselves off. The group’s mutual ownership thus provides reassurance to customers. Recently there has been much discussion about scholarly publishers’ prices and costs. There is a widespread perception that some publishers are ripping off for their customers. As I’ve argued in posts here about open access (OA), I think much of this discussion is poorly informed and poorly reasoned. Nonetheless, such perceptions persist and that in itself constitutes a problem.  OA publishing doesn’t constitute a total solution for scholarly publishing. I won’t repeat in detail the arguments from my previous posts: suffice it to say that the OA model presents a problem to authors whom lack funds; moreover it’s difficult to see how OA in fact saves costs, at least without producing an industry that is under-capitalised or under-marketed. The situation is crying out for co-operative publishers as a component of the industry mix. Imagine a situation in which a co-operative publishing house sets out to service a particular discipline (say, for the sake of an example, qualitative studies in health care) ..."