Is Open Access Destroying Academic Publishers? - EContent Magazine

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-10-14

Summary:

"... when an influential analyst said that a European push toward open access could significantly hurt academic publisher Reed Elsevier's bottom line, many STM publishers took a second look at this model... The latest brouhaha began last summer when three United Kingdom-based education research councils announced that Britons will get easier access to the results of publicly funded research starting in 2014...  While the benefits for Britons are being weighed, the consequences for one of the biggest players in the academic publishing market don't sound quite as rosy, according to Claudio Aspesi, senior research analyst at Sanford Bernstein, a financial research firm. Elsevier's most profitable business is publishing peer-reviewed scientists' work and charging university libraries for the journals. A significant move toward open access could break that business model, Aspesi said in his analyst note.

Although it generated a lot of press, Aspesi's comments generated a large yawn on Wall Street, as Elsevier's stock (ticker: ENL) has been trading in a narrow range since his research note was published. (The stock is up 17% for the year.)  Other analysts, while sharing Aspesi's concern for Elsevier's profitability, are more sanguine about the industry's prospects. Morningstar's Michael Corty's analyst report on Elsevier barely mentions the open access threat, saying that Elsevier is the firm's most profitable unit, has a 25% market share and is three times larger than its closest competitor. His only mention of the open access threat is this side note in small type: 'Some scholarly journal users have been taking more of a stand against the prices charged by publishers for content. As a result, publishers like Reed Elsevier may have to take smaller price increases from academic libraries in future years.'   Corty echoes the same note of caution in his report on John Wiley & Sons ... Universities are increasingly balking at the subscription prices that generate the high profitability that Corty mentioned. This spring, Harvard University's Faculty Advisory Council said in a memo that the increase in journal prices has created an 'untenable situation' for the university's library. It continued, 'Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.'  The council offers faculty and students several suggestions to help combat the problem, including submitting papers to Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH), the university's open access system, and to 'consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs.'  Rebellions against the perceived inflated cost of journals have been gaining followers over the past decade or so. More than 12,000 researchers have signed the online petition, The Cost of Knowledge.  Perhaps the key to the controversy can be found in The Cost of Knowledge website's first sentence: 'Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect.' The internet has disrupted many industries in the last 15 years, with many facets of publishing, like newspapers and magazines, markedly less profitable. New approaches, like the open-access journal publisher Public Library of Science, have been tried, but Elsevier continues to thrive."

Link:

http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Feature/Is-Open-Access-Destroying-Academic-Publishers-85520.htm

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.publishers oa.comment oa.government oa.mandates oa.green oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.libraries oa.plos oa.ir oa.uk oa.costs oa.sustainability oa.librarians oa.prices oa.wiley oa.profits oa.budgets oa.encouragement oa.dash oa.harvard.u oa.business_models oa.repositories oa.policies oa.journals oa.economics_of

Date tagged:

10/14/2012, 10:39

Date published:

10/14/2012, 06:39