RE: On profit and speculative tipping points

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

> Yes, the beneficiaries of scholarly publishing - authors and 
> readers - would be worse off without commercial publishers, in 
> my opinion.  Commercial publishers grew up after the 2nd World 
> War to fill the vacuum which learned societies and other 
> nonprofit publishers were unable to fill.  Nonprofits (at least 
> in the case of societies) are constrained by the boundaries of 
> their subject area - new areas, such as 
> interdisciplinary/crossover or 'twigging' fields, cannot easily 
> be covered by them.  They are also less likely to have the 
> resources (or indeed the ability to undertake risk) to launch 
> new journals, which is always a speculative venture.  And indeed 
> many of the significant new departures which have been made in 
> research publishing - electronic publishing itself, for example 
> - were initially pioneered by commercial publishers with their 
> deeper pockets.
I have a slightly different point of view, Sally, since I believe 
that universities missed a golden opportunity in the postwar era 
to capture the burgeoning STM market through their own already 
long-established presses. Remember that the Johns Hopkins Press 
got its start in the late 19th century by publishing STM 
journals, so universities had been engaged in this business from 
the very beginning. Unfortunately, while gaining tremendously 
from the growth of federal research funding after WW II, 
universities failed to make any investments in their publishing 
infrastructure that could have scaled up to fill the demand. 
Instead, entrepreneurs like Robert Maxwell, who founded Pergamon 
Press, leapt into the gap and the rest is history. Universities 
have no one to blame but themselves for the resultant STM 
"crisis."

> And while Sandy is right that nonprofits might stick with less 
> (or un-) profitable publishing for longer than commercial 
> companies would be willing (or allowed by their shareholders) to 
> do -- given that it is part of their mission -- even they could 
> not do so indefinitely.  And while they did continue, as has 
> been pointed out before on this list, their ability to support 
> other activities of value to the community - subsidizing 
> conferences and other meetings, providing bursaries to attend 
> their own and other meetings, providing prizes and awards, 
> funding research, and carrying out both professional and 
> school-level educational activities, for example - would be 
> impaired.  No one is saying that it is a given that such 
> activities should be funded in future out of library 
> subscriptions - but we do all have to recognize that they would 
> be a casualty of reduced society publishing profits.
They could do so just so long as universities felt it important 
enough to subsidize their presses (or other publishing entities 
within universities, which the Ithaka Report shows to be 
numerous) to support the required publishing infrastructure. The 
role of societies is not a direct function of university control, 
however, and their fate would indeed depend on the willingness of 
society members to pay more dues to support these other worthy 
activities, as opposed to having them funded through the surplus 
from journal subscriptions.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press