The Mixed Marriage of For-profit and Not-for-profit Publishing | The Scholarly Kitchen

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-06-17

Summary:

" ... It is worth thinking a bit about what it means to have for-profit and NFP publishers striving side by side. It is such an unusual circumstance. How many NFPs are there in aviation? In cable television? If you are unhappy with your wireless phone carrier, is there a mission-based alternative? Does the contractor who worked on my kitchen have to compete with an NFP organization, whose sole aim is to improve housing and whose surplus goes right back into other housing projects? While there are NFP publishers in almost every segment of publishing (e.g., the Sierra Club, which is a specialized trade publisher), it is only in scholarly publishing where the NFPs are truly prominent. Just think of some of the names: AAAS, The New England Journal of Medicine, The American Chemical Society, IEEE, The American Physical Society, and that upstart PLOS. And let’s not forget the 134 members of the AAUP, the university press association, which cumulatively publishes just under 15,000 titles a year and bears the principal responsibility for academic certification in the humanities. In my experience the for-profit and NFP participants in scholarly publishing have a great deal of influence on one another, though it is not always acknowledged. The obvious illustration to put forward in this regard is to state the truism that we all live within the economy whether we like it or not. That’s a bitter pill to swallow for many people in the NFP sector, including countless librarians, OA advocates, funding agencies, and university administrators, but you can no more operate outside the economy than you can outside of history. For-profit organizations recognize this and exploit it, often to the disadvantage of NFPs. Indeed, one of the unfortunate aspects of NFP publishing is how the appeal to an organization’s mission often encourages the NFP publisher to let its guard down. This is why the largest scholarly publishers today, and not incidentally the most influential in the overall marketplace, are all for-profit firms. They know how this world works and play hard and tough. A common NFP blunder is to focus on the wrong metric or on one good metric at the exclusion of others. So, for example, it’s not uncommon for an NFP publisher to boast about its impact factor (IF) even as it loses market share year by year. At some point that will catch up to the complacent publisher when the market-based realization is finally brought home; and that realization is that a high IF without a stable and growing market share ultimately leads to a drop in submissions and an erosion of IF ..."

Link:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/06/16/the-mixed-marriage-of-for-profit-and-not-for-profit-publishing/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.economics_of oa.impact oa.jif oa.metrics

Date tagged:

06/17/2015, 09:19

Date published:

06/17/2015, 05:19