Re: Graphing the Bergstrom and McAfee Journal Pricing Data

["Lisa Dittrich" <lrdittrich@aamc.org>]

A couple of things:

The reason I wanted to clarify the publisher issue is that if you are 
going to say a certain publisher is, in essence, gouging librarians (which 
seems to be the point of this exercise), then I think we should have the 
names correct.  An "ad hominem" attack would be calling the researchers 
fat, ugly, stupid, whatever.  I was merely saying that if there are flaws 
in one part of their research, it calls into question other parts.  True 
scholars should be able to handle this sort of question.

So here's another, even more important one:  the whole concept of "for 
profit" and "not for profit" is entirely off.  They say my journal is for 
profit--it is not.  I pointed this out to them; they did not correct it. 
According to B&M, any journal published by one of the big houses is "for 
profit."  This simply isn't true.  Many not-for-profit journals use big 
houses to handle what they are not equipped to do:  manage subscriptions, 
advertising sales, promotions, putting the journal online, printing, 
mailing, etc.  This does not change their non-profit, society based 
status.  But B&M don't make this distinction.  So all of the data is 
skewed.

Now, you could argue that the big publishers proprietary journals are what 
make the prices overall higher in those categories--I don't know.  I 
haven't priced the proprietary journals, nor do I know their value to the 
scholarly community.

This was one of my big problems with B&M's letter in the first place, and 
what made me question their whole premise--they simply didn't seem to 
understand how the publishing world worked.  So when I thought they also 
got the names of the publishers wrong, too, I thought, "who are these 
dodos?"  Now, there's an ad hominem attack.  I've just been holding back.

Lisa Dittrich
Managing Editor
Academic Medicine
2450 N Street NW
Washington,D.C. 20037
lrdittrich@aamc.org (e-mail)
202-828-0590 (phone)
202-828-4798 (fax)
Academic Medicine's Web site: www.academicmedicine.org

>>> Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu> 12/01/05 1:34 PM >>>

While I respect the right of Lisa Dittrich and Morna Conway to argue about 
ownership issues and whether LWW should be grouped under Springer-Kluwer 
or separated out as a separate publisher group, I'm surprised that the 
discussion over these graphs has not taken a more comprehensive and 
comparative view.  It is hyperbolic to argue that these categorical 
disputes amount to "big errors" or that it should weaken one's "confidence 
in anything these guys are doing".  Let's not digress to ad hominem 
attacks and focus on some obvious conclusions that can be derived from the 
analysis and graphs.

1) a confirmation of large price differentials between profit and 
for-profit publishers.  This shouldn't be surprising as this merely 
confirms pricing studies over the last 25 years.

2) that some publishers (when adjusted for the number of articles they 
publish, citations they receive, or subject field) are more costly than 
others.

What is surprising to me (as a librarian), is that the data suggest that 
certain commercial publishers who mainly focus on the social science and 
humanities market appear to be more costly (on a relative basis) than the 
usual STM suspects.

If we are to argue the summary statistics and graphs from the Bergstrom 
and McAfee dataset, it would be more constructive to debate whether the 
measures they employ are good indicators of "value", whether they are 
still relevant in a world of big deals, or whether these data can be used 
to make generalizations about certain publishers or certain fields.

--Phil Davis