Monopolies Employ Bad Practices in Scholarly Publishing

"Lee C. Van Orsdel, Antitrust issues in scholarly and legal publishing, C&RL News, May 2005. Summary of the symposium, Antitrust Issues in Scholarly and Legal Publishing (Washington, D.C., February 11, 2005). Excerpt: 'Ted Bergstrom is professor of Economics at the University of California-Santa Barbara....His data supported his theme - that nonprofit publishers produce most of the citations, while the for-profit publishers collect most of the money. Bergstrom identified three pricing strategies that resulted from the emergence of electronic journals: price discrimination by the size of the university, bundling of content with all-or-nothing pricing, and consortium pricing. He believes that the author-pays open-access model is more competitive than the consumer-pays model because he believes that authors will shop around for the best price... Central to the day's discussions was the contribution of publisher mergers to industry dysfunction. Mary Case, university librarian at the University of Illinois-Chicago, charted recent publisher mergers... Too often the divestiture drives titles right into the stables of other high-priced publishers, exacerbating the problem rather than mitigating it. Case presented data that ties mergers to accelerated journal price increases - a cause and effect relationship that is crystal clear to librarians... James Neal, vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University, spoke to the economic behavior of libraries, strained on all fronts by the shift from print to electronic, from set prices to negotiated prices, from purchasing content to purchasing both content and database management software, from local collection development to collection development by consortia or by publisher-defined bundles. He observed that librarians have a hard time walking away from the negotiating table even when the deals aren't reasonable... Mark McCabe, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and former DOJ economist, has done substantial research on the buying patterns of libraries... He finds a clear correlation between mergers and journal price increases in excess of already high rates of inflation... Rick Johnson, director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), discussed the role of open-access publishing as a legitimate market remedy that promises to reduce the pricing power of publishers, remove unnecessary barriers to access, and introduce efficiencies by unbundling the functions associated with scholarly publishing.'"

Source: Peter Suber. Monopoly practices in scholarly publishing. OA News (11 May 2005) [FullText]