The Arms Race in Journals Publishing Heats Up | The Scholarly Kitchen

" ... It’s useful to recall how we got where we are today. Libraries have done an outstanding job of lowering their administrative costs through various measures. For example, several decades ago the acquisition of library books was made much more efficient by the introduction of approval plans, in which wholesalers preselected the titles a library would acquire. More recently books have become subject to demand-driven acquisition programs, in which the selection of titles is in part influenced by actual usage by library patrons. Another way to reduce handling costs is to reduce the number of vendors. This leads vendors to gobble up other vendors; bigger is better because with scale comes efficiency. This in turn leads us to the Big Deal and libraries’ response to it in the form of consortial purchasing. There is a hidden, or at least unanticipated, cost in reducing the number of vendors, however, in that fewer vendors means bigger vendors and bigger vendors mean greater economic clout. In my experience many librarians remain unaware that they have been complicit in the creation of Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and the other large firms. The savings in costs today can lead to unwelcome market dominance tomorrow. Librarians may wish to ponder the long-term implications of insisting that more and more publications be made available through GOBI. From such small beginnings do towering giants grow. These giants face off and fight to get even larger shares of the academic library budget, but now they have come up against a formidable obstacle, the flattening-out of library budgets, which means that any increase in the revenue of one publisher comes at the expense of another. This is the key point and is worth repeating: for one publisher to gain, another must lose. Hence the arms race:  I will pay top dollar to obtain the rights to the Journal of Highly Specialized Science and then I will use the inclusion of that publication to justify the price of the aggregations I sell to libraries. But if I will pay top dollar, what will you pay? And if this competition has a half-dozen bidders, how big can the numbers get? There is a natural limit to the size of the numbers, though, in that you can’t squeeze water from a stone. A library cannot pay whatever the cost even for the finest material if the money has run out. So it’s a big fight for a pie of finite, and perhaps shrinking, size. And if a library has limits on what it can spend, that imposes limits on the publishers that service libraries on what they can invest ..."