More Like This Please…

Monibot, George (Aug 29 2011) Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist: Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us. Down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers. guardian.co.uk

I do not buy everything in this article, but it is a good overview of the scholarly communications crisis geared to motivate a general audience – which is what we need instead of more hacking of JSTOR.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist

It draws attention to the real problem: the growing monopolization of the scholarly communications field and the subsequent inordinate profits of _some_ publishers at the expense of universities and ultimately the public.  Greater public outcry about expenses of journal databases, if combined with public pressure on publishers to reduce prices, could be very helpful.  More like this please!

Other comments:

While the author’s solution of a single archive funded by libraries seems initially attractive, I think there are strong counter arguments to the proposal of a single archive funded by libraries.

One counter argument is innovation. To their credit, commercial publishers — in cooperation with libraries and other stakeholders — have created really great tools for crunching the literature. Examples: Web of Science citation chaining, Link Resolvers.

I am skeptical that this type of innovation would occur under a one-size-fits all article archive.

I believe we need specialist publishers who serve certain areas that can respond to demand for new tools. And those tools do incur some expenses. At the same time, sleepy little publishers should continue to exist whose customer scholars do not demand high end tools.  I have to believe that lumping both sets of publishers in one category or library would dampen innovation.

But innovation could occur in other sorts of markets with greater competition or less profit maximizing actors.

Moreover, we have a long history of commercial publication of scientific information.  Undoing that infrastructure would be incredibly politically and socio-technically difficult.   But I admit I am a bit of a pessimist about these things.  It would be nice to be wrong.

At the same time, it is also clear that things have gotten out of hand the taxpayers are paying a lot for their public universities to buy access to databases whose publishers report record profits.

Perhaps a more realistic approach would be to pressure the Justice Department to revisit some of its antitrust decisions with regards to big publishers?  See work of Mark McCabe, Ted Bergstrom.  It would be nice to have more people brainstorming alternative realities in this area.

Here is a related article about an anti-trust investigation into e-book pricing.

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