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This article was downloaded by: [University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries]On: 20 December 2014, At: 23:07Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
The Serials Librarian: From thePrinted Page to the Digital AgePublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wser20
The Economics of ScholarlyPublishingOctober Ivins aa Digital Content and Access SolutionsPublished online: 21 Sep 2008.
To cite this article: October Ivins (2005) The Economics of Scholarly Publishing, TheSerials Librarian: From the Printed Page to the Digital Age, 48:1-2, 102-112, DOI:10.1300/J123v48n01_10
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STRATEGY SESSIONS
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The Economics of Scholarly Publishing:Through a Glass, Darkly
October Ivins
Presenter
SUMMARY. The three presentations in this session provide an intro-duction to the economic challenges faced by small scholarly publishers.The first talk reviews trends in the library market and publishing trendsof increased monopolization; the second describes the demands of tech-nological innovation; and the final talk presents a budgetary casestudy from a medium-sized society publisher evaluating the impactof dropping the production of print journals. After the three talks, alist of eight recommendations for alleviating the pressure on smallpublishers was presented for audience discussion. The three speakersare all active in the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and invite acloser collaboration with NASIG. Kasdorf is a Past President and Ivinsand Seitter are Board members. All three are committee chairs or co-chairs. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document DeliveryService: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]>Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>]
© 2005 by the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “The Economics of Scholarly Publishing: Through a Glass, Darkly.”Ivins, October. Co-published simultaneously in The Serials Librarian (The Haworth Information Press, an im-print of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 48, No. 1/2, 2005, pp. 103-112; and: Growth, Creativity, and Collabora-tion: Great Visions on a Great Lake (ed: Patricia Sheldahl French, and Margaret Mering) The HaworthInformation Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2005, pp. 103-112. Single or multiple copies of thisarticle are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. -5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: [email protected]].
http://www.haworthpress.com/web/SERDigital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J123v48n01_10 103
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INTRODUCTION
Many librarians tend to oversimplify when speaking of publishers,concentrating on the large publishers who exhibit at ALA (AmericanLibrary Association) and attend library conferences. Examples includecommercial firms like Elsevier and John Wiley, large societies such asthe Association for Computing Machinery or the American Associationfor the Advancement of Science, and the five or six university presseswith substantial journals programs. The purpose of this talk is to explainthat a much larger and more diverse group of small publishers is shrink-ing, in large part because these publishers are acquisitions targets of thelarger publishers. What are the likely consequences of this trend of in-creasing monopoly and how should the library community respond?My presentation uses preliminary research and calls for additionalresearch. Its data should not be taken as definitive.
AN ULRICH’S/PUBLIST.COM STORY
In 1999, when I worked for PubList.com, we licensed the Ulrich’sdatabase. With the help of our own Oracle programmer, we were able toanalyze data with greater sophistication than UlrichsWeb1 supports. Wecreated as much standardization of publisher names as possible (intro-duced retrospective name authority control) and were able to determinehow many active scholarly journals each publisher produced. Once thismaster list was created, we sorted the list in descending order by thenumber of journals and divided the list into four equal groups, orquartiles. From what I remember, the publishers in the bottom twoquartiles each had a single title, so fifty percent of the publishers hadone scholarly title. This fits the pattern of many small societies, whotypically have one quarterly peer-reviewed title and perhaps a newslet-ter, directory or proceedings. The third quartile had two to six titles, andthe fourth quartile had seven to 1,400 titles, since that’s how many titlesElsevier published in 1999.
This experience, combined with my involvement in the Society forScholarly Publishing (SSP)2 and work with nonprofit publishers such asProject MUSE, has made me keenly aware of the increased competitionfor established, successful scholarly titles from larger publishers. Com-petition is heating up, not only for STM titles, but also for those in thesocial sciences and humanities. The market is becoming more and moremonopolistic with fewer independent publishers, and fewer societies
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published by nonprofit presses. Part of the genesis of this session pro-posal was wondering what the universe of publishers now looks like af-ter six years of continued publisher consolidation.
SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS
Using UlrichsWeb provided some data, but not the broad overview Iwas seeking. I turned to my friends at EBSCO Subscription Servicesand received some very helpful suggestions from Frank Mapes andJennifer O’Connell, and especially Lynn Fortney, who reminded me ofthe recent Library Journal article, “Periodicals Prices 2004” written byKathleen Born and Lee Van Orsdel.3 They make a similar observationand divide publishers into three tiers. Their Tier 1 is a group of sevenwhich includes Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Blackwell, Wiley andLippincott and both Springer and Kluwer (their merger was not com-pleted during 2003 when the data was collected). They place large so-ciety and university presses in Tier 2 along with smaller commercialpublishers and cite as examples the university presses of Cambridge,Harvard, MIT and Oxford, American Institute of Physics, AmericanChemical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,and the Nature Publishing Group. Tier 3 corresponds to the group that isour focus today, characterized as a ”diverse network with one or moretitle each.” They note that some of these titles are included in nonprofitaggregators such as Project Muse, BioOne, and Euclid, while othersuse, or may also use, hosting services such as MetaPress and its compet-itors. These competitors include Ingenta, Extenza and Atypon, thenonprofits American Institute of Physics Scitation service and High-Wire Press.4
TIER 3 OR AT-RISK PUBLISHERS
My premise is that academic librarians focus on the Tier 1 and 2 pub-lishers, which is reasonable given that they publish more titles and ac-tively market to librarians. As a result, the Tier 3 scholarly publishersare both “off the radar” of academic librarians and at risk for being ac-quired by larger publishers. By “off the radar,” I mean that these pub-lishers do not have the visibility as a community that would help themsurvive in the current difficult economic climate. Their titles are at riskfor library cancellations. Their titles are usually not protected by Big
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Deals and other types of multi-year contracts, and many are in nicherather than core disciplines. My argument is that the library communityneeds to understand and support this part of the scholarly informationcommunity.
The publishers in this group are diverse:
• Scholarly and Professional Associations (generally with a quarterlyrefereed journal, newsletter and maybe directory or proceedings)
• University presses (most focus on books)• Independent nonprofits, outside of university presses, may be run
by a few faculty members or based in an academic department orinstitute at a university or college
• Independent for-profits, also included because not all commercialpublishers have profitable, big title lists.
It is difficult to quantify the number of journals and publishers in Tier 3.Born and Van Orsdel suggest there are about 20,000 scholarly publica-tions and their data is based on the 5,380 titles covered in the Institutefor Scientific Information databases. My “quick-and-dirty” Ulrich’s re-search found that the largest publishers have 6,800 journals.
LIBRARY TRENDS
My argument is based on the idea that scholarly publishing is a sys-tem and that changes in one area can have unanticipated effects in otherparts of the system. This information will be familiar to most librarians,but I want to review some pertinent library trends:
• The pressure on library budgets continues to be extreme, and cur-rency exchange rates are likely to make 2005 journal price in-creases even worse.
• E-format preference is becoming policy. Led by The InternationalCoalition of Library Consortia and Yale, many libraries are devel-oping their own policies to prefer electronic formats when certaincriteria are met.5
• Print cancellations are accelerating.• The first two trends contribute to accelerating print journal cancel-
lations. In a recent survey of Project MUSE customers, only sevenpercent have no plans to cancel print, while fifty percent are eithercanceling now or planning to do so within five years.
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• There is a misleading focus on price increase by percentage not thedollar amount. Margaret Landesman has written for the CharlestonAdvisor that the price of a subscription is what matters, not the per-centage of the price increase. She notes that an eight percent in-crease can be much larger than a twenty percent increase in actualdollars.5 As one librarian noted, “Project MUSE could double theirprice to us and it would not equal the price increase of our Elsevierpackage for one year.”
• Demand for backfiles continues to increase. Users want onlinefull-text journal backfiles and librarians want to provide it forthem. Converting print backfiles to digital is an expensive under-taking for publishers.
• Usage measures are being used for renewal decisions. The devel-opment and widespread implementation of COUNTER standardsmeans meaningful, “apples to apples” usage statistics are avail-able. While we need to understand the differences in usage pat-terns among disciplines and types of materials, librarians willincreasingly be able to consider usage statistics in making renewaland cancellation decisions.
LIBRARY TRENDS THAT RESTRICT BUDGET FLEXIBILITY
Trends that tie up library funds and restrict budget flexibility are par-ticularly dangerous for the Tier 3 publishers. Depending on the sourceof funds used for consortial Big Deal and aggregator purchases (i.e.,money that would have been/is allocated to libraries vs. new state fund-ing), this can have the effect of tying up an increasingly large proportionof a library’s budget, further restricting the funds available to renewjournals from smaller publishers. These trends include:
• More consortial buying and Big Deals equals less money for localcollection development
• Statewide and consortial deals for Big Three aggregators: EBSCOHost, ProQuest, Thomson/Gale
• Little or no budget to add new titles, especially in non-STM areas• Publishers can no longer project three to five years for a new jour-
nal to become profitable, so fewer new journals are started. Thismakes established journals attractive to publishers.
• SPARC adds alternatives but libraries cannot cancel original jour-nals (yet?)
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• How many libraries have canceled the Journal of Academic Li-brarianship because the SPARC journal Portal is now available?Do not most libraries have to buy both the title SPARC replacesand the replacement? This creates additional budget pressure.
• Open Access
What impact will the open access movement have? Is this just an STMconcern?
LIBRARY/NONPROFIT TRENDS
There are also some trends we should consider that are not exclu-sively library trends. A few nonprofit aggregators have been establishedto serve some disciplines. Project MUSE and JSTOR serve humani-ties and social science publishers (although JSTOR handles onlybackfiles). More recently, BioOne was established for publishers inthe biological, ecological and environmental sciences. Project Euclidsupports mathematics and statistics.
While most universities publish primarily monographs, a few havelarge journal programs and some are expanding. The University of Min-nesota Press started a journals program in the past few years, and theUniversity of Pennsylvania Press started one in 2004. Duke UniversityPress has special funds from their Provost to expand into STM journals.The University of California Press is creating a portal for the AmericanAnthropological Association with grant funding.
DESTABILIZATION AND COMPLETION
This series of environmental trends results in industry destabilizationand increased competition among publishers. Financial pressure is in-creasing on all publishers, but those in Tier 3 are least able to “ride itout.” The limited market for new titles makes taking over established ti-tles attractive. As a result, publishers are experiencing increased com-petition for society titles from Tier 1 and 2 publishers. For example,university presses cannot compete financially with an acquisition orhosting offer from a commercial publisher. Many publishers publish ti-tles that are owned and edited by societies and professional organiza-tions. Previously, most have left society titles in the humanities andsocial sciences to the university presses. This area is of increasing focus
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for Blackwell and Sage, while the larger commercial presses are movingfrom STM to social science journals.
WHEN IS A SOCIETY NOT A NONPROFIT,OR WHY DO WE CARE?
Based on preliminary research using UlrichsWeb, I have created achart to illustrate the prevalence of commercial publishers publishingjournals on behalf of non-profit publishers. I reviewed a similar groupto those Born and Van Orsdel characterized as Tier 1 publishers with afew differences: I combined Kluwer and Springer, omitted Lippincott,and added Sage. I conducted searches using UlrichsWeb, selectingpeer-reviewed journals that are active (or unverified–per UlrichsWeb)with the publisher cited as Elsevier. I conducted additional searches onthis retrieval set using additional criteria for publisher in three differentsearches: “association,” “institute” and “society.” Although I was try-ing to find the proportion of nonprofit journals published by commer-cial publishers, many publishers may have one of these words in theirname and also be a commercial publisher, while many nonprofit organi-zations (like the North American Serials Interest Group) may benonprofits and not have these words in their name. I acknowledge theinadequacy of this approach. My purpose is to suggest a trend thatdeserves in-depth research.
Figure 1 shows the total number of journals retrieved in each search,a sum of the three results for “association,” “institute” and “society” andthe percentage this sum is of the total results for the commercial pub-lisher. As the chart indicates, these proportions range from twenty toforty-five percent of all journals published by these firms. Indeed, in theclosing session, John Tagler noted that one half of Elsevier’s titles arepublished on behalf of societies, and Blackwell states on their Websitethat all of their journals are published on behalf of societies.
WHY DO WE CARE?
We care because of the steep price increases that occur when a titlemoves from a nonprofit to a for-profit publisher. Figure 2 illustrateswhat has happened to the subscription rates of titles that have left Pro-ject MUSE for other publishers. You can see only a single modest in-crease from Cambridge University Press. Prices for two titles that have
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recently left have not yet been announced. (I was allowed to use thisdata provided I did not use the journal names.)
Figure 3 illustrates the problem with focusing on percentage in-creases rather the actual amount of the increase. Both are valid mea-sures, but looking only at percentages can be very misleading. Thisexample, fifteen years of pricing history for Serials Review, is not datathat was readily available to me. I suspect that most subscription agentsdo not maintain this type of historical data; I asked Cindy Hepfer, for-mer editor of Serials Review and a librarian at SUNY Buffalo, to pro-vide this information. You can see that the largest percentage increasesoccurred from 1995 to 1999 when JAI Press took over the title, beforeselling it to Pergamon (an Elsevier imprint). However, the Elsevierprice increases are all larger in dollar amounts.
Here is another view on the pricing conundrum. Serials Review waslikely under-priced when it was published by Pierian. Would our com-
110 Growth, Creativity, and Collaboration: Great Visions on a Great Lake
FIGURE 1. When Is a Society Not a Nonprofit?
Publisher All Soc. Assn. Inst. Non-P %
Springer & Kluwer 1,703 191 94 57 342 20.1%
Elsevier 1,846 186 103 23 312 16.9%
Blackwell 659 185 87 28 300 45.5%
Taylor & Francis 856 70 81 22 173 20.2%
Sage 303 33 43 23 99 32.7%
John Wiley 349 44 20 13 77 22.1%
5,716 1,303 22.8%
FIGURE 2. Why Does It Matter? Prices of Former Project MUSE Journals
MUSE Price withNew Publisher
Increase New Publisher
$153 $302 97% Sage
$140 $157 12% Cambridge
$40 $199 398% Palgrave Macmillan
$42 $128 205% Blackwell’s
$69 $115 67% Blackwell’s
$51 $108 111% AMS Press Inc.
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munity have been better served if Ed Wall, the owner of Pierian Press,had doubled or tripled the price to $110 or $165 in 1990 instead of sell-ing? Could he have sustained that price, instead of increasing to the2004 price of $274? Was he the victim of being too responsible or tooresponsive to his community of subscribers? How much of the price in-creases that occur when a title is sold are “legitimate” and how can con-sumers determine this? That would be another research project.
Now, we’ll hear from my colleagues, Bill Kasdorf and Keith Seitter.After their presentations, we’ll discuss some proposed strategies.
NOTES
1. http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/2. Society for Scholarly Publishing, http://www.sspnet.org/3. Van Orsdel, Lee and Kathleen Born, “Periodicals Price Survey 2004: Closing in on
Open Access,” Library Journal 127, no. 7 (April 15, 2004): 45-50.4. Ivins, October and Judy Luther, “eJournal Hosts: The Next Generation,” EContent
27, no. 1/2 (Jan.-Feb. 2004): 35-36, 37-39. http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=6026&IssueId=204
5. Landesman, Margaret, “Price Increases Are Not the Problem,” The Charleston Ad-visor 5 no. 3 (Jan. 2004), http://charlestonco.com/features.cfm?id=149&type=ed
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FIGURE 3. Serials Review, 1990-2004. Price History Through Pierian, JAI andPergamon
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CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE
October Ivins is Consultant to Information Providers at Digital Content and AccessSolutions.
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