The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers - News - Bubblews

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-07-05

Summary:

"In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers. The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist. It all checks out. I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe. Here they are again: profits as a percentage of revenue for commercial STM publishers in 2010 or early 2011 ... What does it all mean? Yes, publishers have a right to make a living. Not only that, but they have a right to make as big a profit as the market can bear (though of course when they form a cartel that distorts the market monopolistically, that changes things).  But here’s what it means to scientists that Elsevier’s profit is 35.74% of revenue:  When you pay $37.95 to download a PDF from an Elsevier journal, $13.56 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.  When you pay $3000 to have your submission to an Elsevier journal appear as open access, $1072.20 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.  When your library pays $1.7m for a bundle of Elsevier-journal subscriptions, $607,580 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.  When you or your library pays Elsevier $23783 for any reason, that is enough for them fund Representative Caroline Maloney’s $8500 bribe to co-sponsor the evil Research Works Act, out of their profits alone.  You just have to ask yourself whether that’s where you want your money going."

Link:

http://www.bubblews.com/news/4229655-the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.profits oa.wiley oa.springer oa.elsevier oa.informa.

Date tagged:

07/05/2014, 08:28

Date published:

07/05/2014, 04:28