Check out Ted Bergstrom's
home page, and this list
of particularly expensive journals in economics.
Given that Elsevier is charging an obscene $1893 a year to nearly every
major academic library in the world for the Journal of Econometrics, why
doesn't someone come in and undercut them? Well, it's not so easy.
Journals have reputations that are developed over many years, and for
researchers, it matters that your article gets published in a "good"
journal. That's really the whole point of a journal: it acts as a kind of
stamp of quality. If you start a new journal, besides all the usual costs
associated with starting a print magazine, there is a chicken and egg
problem with developing a reputation: in order to get a high standing in
the field, you need to get the best quality articles submitted to you; but
no one wants to submit a good article to a new journal without a good
reputation. In economic terms, it's not a classical market where many
suppliers can produce identical commodities. Instead there is a lot of
product differentiation, and associated with the product differentiation
are major barriers to entry.
Also, the market can only sustain a few journals in any specialized area.
There have been some big mergers in the academic publishing industry
lately, and some people argue that the industry is now so concentrated
that the DOJ should consider antitrust action; see here for
instance.
Academic publishers are really just middlemen, and with the possibility of
publishing directly on the web, it makes sense to try to cut out the
middleman altogether while maintaining the peer-review and archival
properties of traditional journals. The key is figuring out how to
overcome the reputation problem, but given how dissatisfied people are
with journal these days, that really should be doable. If I were Elsevier
or one of the other major publishers, I would be (a) making a lot of
money, but (b) worried about what the internet will eventually do to my
business.
> Unfortunetely, you gain a lot more
> brownie points in scietific cicles
> for publishing anything on dead tree
> than publishing it online. Even if
> neither version are peer-reviewed,
> the dead-tree version counts for more.
This is somewhat true but it varies by discipline, and the situation is changing (albeit slowly). In any case it is possible to publish a paper book and keep strong online publishing rights - some of O'Reilly's books come to mind. I would not be surprised if more academic authors start to get wise to the benefits of negotiating publishing rights more carefully, and of using free and open copyright licenses.
I wish we had a little more information on what exactly happened with CRC Press, but it does seem like a dumb PR move on their part even if they were within their rights. But maybe this points to the need for a truly free (in the GPL sense) online math encyclopedia on the web, one which cannot be taken away from the community in this way? I am not willing to start or manage this but if there were a well-run project I would certainly consider contributing.
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Given that Elsevier is charging an obscene $1893 a year to nearly every major academic library in the world for the Journal of Econometrics, why doesn't someone come in and undercut them? Well, it's not so easy. Journals have reputations that are developed over many years, and for researchers, it matters that your article gets published in a "good" journal. That's really the whole point of a journal: it acts as a kind of stamp of quality. If you start a new journal, besides all the usual costs associated with starting a print magazine, there is a chicken and egg problem with developing a reputation: in order to get a high standing in the field, you need to get the best quality articles submitted to you; but no one wants to submit a good article to a new journal without a good reputation. In economic terms, it's not a classical market where many suppliers can produce identical commodities. Instead there is a lot of product differentiation, and associated with the product differentiation are major barriers to entry.
Also, the market can only sustain a few journals in any specialized area. There have been some big mergers in the academic publishing industry lately, and some people argue that the industry is now so concentrated that the DOJ should consider antitrust action; see here for instance.
Academic publishers are really just middlemen, and with the possibility of publishing directly on the web, it makes sense to try to cut out the middleman altogether while maintaining the peer-review and archival properties of traditional journals. The key is figuring out how to overcome the reputation problem, but given how dissatisfied people are with journal these days, that really should be doable. If I were Elsevier or one of the other major publishers, I would be (a) making a lot of money, but (b) worried about what the internet will eventually do to my business.
> Unfortunetely, you gain a lot more
> brownie points in scietific cicles
> for publishing anything on dead tree
> than publishing it online. Even if
> neither version are peer-reviewed,
> the dead-tree version counts for more.
This is somewhat true but it varies by discipline, and the situation is changing (albeit slowly). In any case it is possible to publish a paper book and keep strong online publishing rights - some of O'Reilly's books come to mind. I would not be surprised if more academic authors start to get wise to the benefits of negotiating publishing rights more carefully, and of using free and open copyright licenses.
I wish we had a little more information on what exactly happened with CRC Press, but it does seem like a dumb PR move on their part even if they were within their rights. But maybe this points to the need for a truly free (in the GPL sense) online math encyclopedia on the web, one which cannot be taken away from the community in this way? I am not willing to start or manage this but if there were a well-run project I would certainly consider contributing.