Friday, August 6, 2004

Dan Sabbagh, Reed Elsevier chief hits back in scientific publishing row, London Times, August 6, 2004. Excerpt: "Critics argue that the scientific community should abandon seeking publication in journals of the type that Reed owns in favour of the 'open-source' model, in which authors pay to have their research made public. 'After five years, the author-pays model has gained a 1 per cent market share,' Sir Crispin said as the Anglo-Dutch group reported interim results. 'Libraries do push back on costs, but we are securing a 96 per cent renewal rate, and that tells the real story.'" [Open Access News] This is the height of hypocrisy. Elsevier's bundling practices make it very difficult for libraries to drop titles from their holdings. No, libraries don't want most of those titles, and there are no real economies of scale in journal publishing that justify the bundle "discount". It's all a matter of exploiting their control of a few high-impact titles to strong-arm libraries into taking an expensive bundled padded with less relevant titles. Given this market power, it's not surprising that the renewal rate stays relatively high. Still, .96 compounded over 10 years is 2/3. Compounding really hurts, as the long-distance telephone industry has been learning. 10:00:33 AM