Introduction
Although scholarly communication and academic debate had
previously been taking place in personal communication between scholars such as
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the first academic journals didn’t
appear until the seventeenth century. The first journal Le Journal des Sçavans was published in France in 1665, followed by
Philosophical Transactions, which was
published later that year by the Royal Society in London. As of today, it is
estimated that there are more than 50 million scholarly articles in existence
(Jinha, 2010). The academic journal is important in the system of knowledge
because it ‘defines the social processes through which knowledge is made, and
gives tangible form to knowledge’ (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009: 15). Furthermore,
as an important disseminator of knowledge, the academic journal ‘lies at the
heart of [the] system of scholarly communication and has stood the test of
time’ (Cope and Phillips, 2009: 1).
Throughout three and a half centuries or so, the growth of
the academic journal has led to the library fulfilling an important role as ‘a
formal archive of the scholarly record’ (Davies, 2009: 224). In the digital
age, now more than ever, libraries are ‘playing an even more important role in
ensuring access to, and the preservation of, a comprehensive collection of
scholarly output’ (Davies, 2009: 214). This is because once created, articles
are rarely destroyed and can always be reactivated or retrieved through
electronic databases and ‘through citation, each article occupies a position in
the architecture that researchers can continue to build upon’ (Jinha, 2010:
258).
Since the 1960s, as commercial publishers have realised the potential
profitability of journals, they have sought to selectively acquire the best
journals that were previously being published by not-for-profit (or ‘society’)
scholarly publishers (McGuigan and Russell, 2008). According to Edwards and
Shulenberger (2003: 14), ‘the commercial publishers, which recognized the
relative inelasticity of both supply and demand, acquired top-quality journals,
and then dramatically raised prices, expecting that they would lose relatively
little of the market.’ An expectation which has unfortunately held true ever
since.
This acquisition strategy, combined with subsequent merger
and consolidation activity, has resulted in ‘a highly concentrated industry’ in
which firms that control large portfolios of journals ‘have an incentive to
charge higher prices’ (McGuigan and Russell, 2008; McCabe, 2002: 261). In a
study for the American Research Libraries (ARL), McCabe (1998) noted that
‘prices are indeed positively related to firm portfolio size [i.e., number of
journal published by a firm], and that mergers [of firms] result in significant
price increases.’ All of this has resulted in what is widely described as a
‘serials crisis’ whereby libraries have simply been unable to afford the
continuous price rises, which has had deleterious effects on library acquisition
budgets (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009: 24). In some cases, libraries ‘have been
forced to reallocate dollars from monographs to journals, to postpone the
purchase of new journal titles, and in some cases, cancel titles’ (Kyrillidou
in McCabe, 2002: 259).
According to Shipp (2006: 37),
scholarly publishing is ‘an industry unlike any other’. It is an industry
characterised by a large number of producers (academics and researchers) who
supply a relatively small market which consists of academic and research
libraries. He notes, ‘there is little direct competition between the individual
products of each supplier and in many respects it has been an undiscriminating marketplace’
(Shipp (2006: 37). The academic community produces the goods, provides
editorial and peer review services, and gives away its scholarly content to
commercial publishers (Steele, 2012). The publishers then impose restrictive
copyright regulations and sell the content back to university libraries at
great profit – from the work the universities originally created (James, 2011:
189; Steele, 2012). In the digital age where access and distributions costs are
low, the logic of this transaction is no longer tenable (Steele, 2012).
Aims and Objectives
The aim of this essay is to explore international and local
debates surrounding the high price of access to knowledge in Australia with
reference to the wider international environment. In particular, it will seek
to understand how and why academic journal publishing comes at such a high
price to the consumer. This will be achieved by looking at the structure of the
academic journal publishing sector, the economics of journal publishing, and
arguments against the current ‘free labour’ business model. Ultimately, the
research will seek to answer the question posed – is academic publishing a
licence to print money? Although important issues, this research will not be
interested in arguments surrounding open access models, or the fate of
scholarly monograph publishing and its implications and challenges for
libraries and university presses.
The state of play
The academic journal industry
includes both for-profit and not-for-profit publishers (McCabe, Nevo and
Rubinfield, 2006: 5). Traditionally, academic journals have been a highly profitable
sector of the publishing industry. In 2011, Elsevier, the largest publisher of
academic journals made a massive profit of 37%. Springer’s Science+Business
Media made 34%, John Wiley & Sons (including Blackwell Publishing) made
42%, and the academic division of Informa plc made 32% (SV POW, 2012). Over time,
consolidation through merger and acquisition has led to the industry being
dominated by a small number of publishers, which has meant that ‘more and more
content [is] in the hands of fewer and fewer firms, thus increasing their
market share’ (Moghaddam, 2009: 149). This has particularly been the case in
the most lucrative sector of science, technical and medicine (STM) publishing
(McCabe 2002: 262). According to Shipp (2006: 38). ‘where there is a high
correlation between research and its commercial application’, publishing tends
‘to be dominated by a relatively small number of companies which each publish a
large number of refereed titles and often also control the main indexing and
abstracting services.’
In a 2006 report on scholarly
journal publishing, the Research Information Network (RIN) estimated that
approximately 20,000-25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals were being
published globally, and at that time, had been growing at an annual rate of
3-4% over the past 100 years (RIN, 2006: 5). In its annual report for 2012, Elsevier
reported that it published more than 330,000 articles in more than 2,000
journals. According to Springer’s website, it published over 2,200 journals;
and in its 2011 annual report, John Wiley & Sons reported that it published
1,600 journals.
In the Library Journal’s ‘Periodicals Price Survey 2013’, it
noted that these publishers dominated more than half of their titles (Bosch
and Henderson, 2013). In a report on scientific publishing in 2002, Morgan
Stanley suggested that academic journals had been ‘the fastest growing media sub-sector
over the past fifteen years’ (Morgan Stanley, 2002). This fits with the UK
Office of Fair Trading’s report in 2002 that ‘the overall profitability of
commercial STM publishing is high, not only by comparison to “non-profit”
journals…but also by comparison to other commercial journal publishing.’
Whilst the data is more than a
decade old, Houghton (2001: 169), suggests that ‘scholarly content creation in
Australia involves up to 200,000 contributors whose activities are supported by
annual expenditures in excess of $10 billion, much of which is funded by the
government. He estimates that around 25,000 journal papers are written each
year. As will be seen, due to bundling practices by commercial publishers and
nondisclosure agreements with libraries, it is not possible to estimate how
much Australian libraries spend on journal subscriptions; however, Houghton
(2001: 170) estimates that in 1998, Australian university libraries spent $94
million on their subscriptions.
Shipp (2006: 38) notes that,
‘[b]etween 1986 and 1998, the median cost of journals purchased by Australian
university libraries rose by 226%’, whilst the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose
57% for the same period – that is almost an incredible four times inflation!
The situation is similar in the United States, where according to Edwards and
Shulenburger (2003: 11), for the fifteen years between 1986 and 2001, scholarly
journal prices increased by 8.5% per year, whilst the CPI rose by 3.5% per
year, ‘which means that journal prices jumped by 215% over the entire period,
while the CPI rose by just 64%.’
Knowledge as a public good
It is generally argued that scholarship, and therefore the
content of scholarly journals, is a public good (Edwards and Shulenburger,
2003: 12; Odlyzko 1997; Panitch and Michalak, 2005). According to Edwards and
Shulenburger (2003: 12-13), a ‘public good is one for which one consumer’s use
of the good is not competitive with, or exclusive of, another consumer’s use of
the good.’ In this way, a public good ‘is a commodity whose use is non-rivalrous and non-excludable (Dasgupta, 2007: 52). Amongst economists
it has long been recognised that ‘public goods cannot be organized efficiently
through the private market’ (Edwards and Shulenburger, 2003: 13). The
only way to overcome this inefficiency is through collective action in one of
two forms: public provision, or publicy-subsidised private provision (Dasgupta,
2007: 52).
So, if scholarly communication is a public good, there
should be scepticism over whether an unregulated market is the most efficient
means to distribute its product. As has already been discussed, the entry of
the big commercial publishers into the system has not only consolidated the
industry and raised prices, but
This transformation has largely destroyed the
old, university-based system for the provision of a public good (knowledge) and
replaced it with an inappropriate (and inefficient, in the technical sense)
private market, which lacks any provision for handling knowledge as a public
good (Edwards and Shulenburger, 2003: 13).
Free labour?
In recent times, the excessive profits
earned by commercial publishers have become the fuel for outrage among scholars
who are no longer prepared to support the profits that the large academic
publishing houses are extracting from publicly-financed knowledge; that is,
public goods. The argument is that commercial publishers should not be making
profits off the ‘free labour’ of academics. In Australia, and elsewhere around
the world, academics and scientists at government-funded universities and
institutions carry out research and write journal articles about their
findings. The paper is then peer-reviewed by other state-funded academics and
scientists, and then edited and laid out by institutional or university staff.
The article is then most likely submitted to one of the large commercial publishers
who publishes the paper, and then charges the same taxpayer funded institutions
exorbitant fees for subscriptions to academic journals in which the publisher’s
contribution to the value-adding process is small in comparison (Hartwich,
2009).
Essentially, the whole process –
the research, reviewing and editing – is publicly funded and publishers are
selling taxpayer-funded research back to academics and researchers via journal
subscriptions. It is an unsustainable model in which taxpayers fund the
research, and then have to pay again to read it. According to Gusterson (2012),
the inconsistencies in this model originally made sense:
Academic
journals, especially in the social sciences, were published by struggling,
nonprofit university presses that could ill afford to pay for content,
refereeing, or editing. It was expected that, in the vast consortium that [the]
university system constitutes, our own university would pay our salary, and we
would donate our writing and critical-reading skills to the system in return.
In a plea to the academic community, Gusterson (2012) suggests
that the ‘archaic notions of unpaid craft labor’ should be abandoned, and
insists on ‘professional compensation for scholarly expertise.’ He also
contends that publishers should pay ‘a modest fee to acquire our intellectual
content if they publish our articles’ and that the professional associations
‘could recommend standard fees for refereeing articles and for compensating
authors of articles.’
Welcome to the Academic Spring
These ill feelings towards the
commercial publishers are now spreading across the globe. In 2012, Tim Gower, a
respected Cambridge mathematician commented on his blog that he would ‘refuse
to have anything to do with Elsevier journals’. This then gave birth to the
Cost of Knowledge (2013) website, in which scholars are so fed up, that at the
time of writing, almost 14,000 academics have declared a boycott against
Elsevier – refusing to publish, referee and perform editorial work. In
frustration with what they perceive as a broken system, academic have been
putting words into action and resigning their positions from the editorial
boards of Elsevier’s journals. Just recently, Greg Martin, a number theorist at
the University of British Columbia, declared his resignation and added his name
to the petition. In the words of one commentator: welcome to the ‘Academic
Spring’ (Jha, 2012).
A licence to print money?
As can be seen by the above
mentioned profits, academic journal publishing is a lucrative business for
publishers, and because of ‘free labour’, some would argue it is a licence to
print money. In the United States, an annual subscription to Tetrahedron,
a chemistry journal, costs libraries US$20,269, and a year’s access to the Journal
of Mathematical Sciences, costs US$20,100 (Open Sesame, 2012). Unfortunately,
there is little data on the cost of access to academic journals in Australia
(Hollier, 2012). The problem with such exorbitant pricing is that library
acquisition budgets – particularly in relation to humanities publications – are
put under extreme pressure as libraries are forced to purchase subscriptions in
the areas of science, technology and medicine (Hollier, 2012).
Budget pressures
In a memorandum in 2012, the
world’s richest academic institution, Harvard University, said that it could no
longer afford the high cost of academic journal subscriptions. The university
told its members, ‘Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly
communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive.
This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers…to acquire,
bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.’ It noted further that:
Harvard’s annual
cost for journals from these [publishers] now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the
comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription
costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library
acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of
thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about
145% over the past six years (Harvard, 2012).
In an interview for the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation (ABC, 2012), Robert Darnton, director of Harvard
University Library, stated that, ‘at the time of the great financial crisis of
2008 here at Harvard, the library funding was cut back 10%, and in that same
year most journal prices went up by 10%.’ In the same interview, he suggests that
many academic and university departments are ‘complicit in the current system
of journal publishing because they expect library services but they don’t
necessarily know the full costs.’
False consciousness
In this way, there is an
extraordinary irrationality built into the heart of the academic journal
publishing system. As already mentioned, academics provide the ‘free labour’
from which the publishers extract their large profits, and then sell the
product of the academics’ labour back to them through libraries at extravagant
prices. Darnton (ABC, 2012) refers to this in Marxist terms as a collective
‘false consciousness’ among researchers and professors, ‘because they don’t ask
where is the money coming from for this article that I must read, and who is
the publisher, and how did it reach me?’
More so, these comments suggest a
form of commodity fetishism, which according to Marx, is ‘a definite social
relation between men…the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx
n.d:n.pag). This fetishism ‘attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon
as they are produced as commodities’, and has its origin ‘in the peculiar
social character of the labour that produces them’ (Marx n.d:n.pag). In this
way, the conditions under which journal articles are produced and sold back to
the academic community are reified.
Lack of price signals
The system is also irrational
because it does not allow for price signals to feed back to the consumer
(Houghton 2001: 173). According to Edlin and Rubinfield (2005: 442), there is
an inherent inability in the system ‘to effectively monitor faculty use.’
Because of this disconnect between the consumers of the product (researchers
and academics) and the purchasers (librarians) sensitivity to price is lowered,
which results in a market characterised by low price elasticity; or, in other
words, consumer behaviour is not sufficiently affected by price signals. Publishers,
then, are able to continue to raise prices without having to worry about losing
revenue from cancelled subscriptions. When librarians go to cancel a title due
to cost concerns they rarely find support from their academic colleagues, thereby
making academics complicit in the current system (Pinfield, 2013: 86).
Monopoly on prestige
Consolidation among publishers, combined with the relative
price inelasticity of the market, has allowed commercial publishers
considerable power to keep raising their prices (Phillips, 2009: 91). Once
established in its field, an academic journal becomes a ‘must have’ title for
other academics through the reputation that it has accrued. In this way, the
articles published in the journal cannot be obtained from any other source, and
so the journal ‘operates as its own mini-monopoly in the market.’
This means
that when prices are increased there will still be a demand for the title
because it is not able to be substituted, which adds another factor to the low
price elasticity of demand in the market (Pinfield, 2013: 86). The importance
of prestige is also important in the promotion and tenure system, with tenure
committees only recognising contributions from specified lists of (mostly)
top-tier journals (Moghaddam, 2009:150). According to Odlyzko (1997), as the
writers of journal articles, scholars
determine what journals their work
will appear in, and thus how much it will cost society to publish their work.
However, scholars have no incentive to care about these costs. What matters the
most to them is the prestige of the journals they publish in.
As has already been discussed above, academics are finding
this system untenable. The commercial publishers will only be able to retain
their prestige and subscription base so long as they have the support of the
academic community.
Electronic panacea?
These days, the majority of academic journals are
disseminated online. In 2008, the ratio of print to electronic subscriptions at
QUT was 5:95, down from the 30:70 split of 2001 (Cleary, 2009: 373). According
to Strieb and Blixrud (2013), in 2012, with the exception of a single
publisher, ‘no [ARL] libraries reported that they retained corresponding
subscriptions for their complete journal bundles.’ Although there are certain
cost advantages to the library in terms of storage, maintenance, photocopying
and reshelving, there are additional costs such as the cost of equipment,
software, communications and training staff to provide expertise in accessing
electronic journals online (Tenopir and King, 1999: 256).
Whilst the digital revolution has brought about the ‘digitization
of text, image and sound and the sudden emergence of the internet as a
universal conduit for digital content’, it has not brought about cheaper prices
for online journals (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009: 18; Tenopir and King, 1999:
256). Given the lower production and distributions costs afforded by
technology, it might have been expected that the move to digital forms of
subscription would have allowed for publishers to offer lower prices.
Unfortunately, this has not been the case.
A case study of ecology journals by Bergstrom and Bergstrom
(2006: 488) showed no reduction in prices for online-only journals. According
to Cope and Kalantzis (2009: 24), publishers are still basing their fees on the
economies of traditional print publishing. Not only are the profits of the
commercial publishers excessively high, but so too are their cost structures,
which adds further argument that the market is characterised by monopolistic
inefficiencies and demonstrates a complacency which comes from controlling the
‘must have’ prestige titles demanded by academics.
In an examination of the economics of journal production,
Odlyzko (1997) estimated that the average cost of producing a journal article
is US$4,000. This is calculated on the total costs of preparing the first copy
of an article and is referred to in the literature as a ‘first-copy cost’
(Moghaddam 2009: 150). According to King (2007: 90), considering the total
cost, 70-80% of the production cost is first-copy cost. When most of the
primary work is being done with ‘free labour’, this cost is inexcusably high
(Cope and Kalantzis, 2009: 24).
What is the ‘Big Deal’?
Another reason prices are hard to monitor is because of what
is known in the industry as the ‘Big Deal’, or ‘bundling’ (Moghaddam, 2009:
149). According to Cleary (2009: 364), a ‘Big Deal’ is defined as ‘an
aggregation, package, or bundle of online journals, often the entire collection
of a commercial publisher, licensed to libraries for a fixed period of years,
via a contract negotiated as a standard price’ (Cleary, 2009: 364). The problem
with these deals is that ‘in signing on to the package of journals, the
libraries [lose] the freedom to drop individual journal subscriptions for a
period of time (generally three years)’, it also obligates them to an
inflationary fixed price structure for the package, which is often 7% for the
life of the contract (Edwards and Shulenburger, 2003: 14).
In its survey, ‘The State of Large-Publisher Bundles in 2012’,
the ARL noted that the ‘the ability to share information about contract terms,
as well as pricing information…is dependent on the knowledge of what is in the
agreements’ (Strieb and Blixrud, 2013). The difficulty, however, is that the
commercial publishers force a nondisclosure clause on libraries, such that
there can be no sharing of information between stakeholders. This has been the
reason for the establishment of consortium groups which are able to more
favourably negotiate the terms of the ‘Big Deal’ for thier members.
Whilst there are advantages in these ‘Big Deals’, for
example, increased access to information, purchasing cost-effectiveness, budget
predictability, and streamlined workflows, these arrangements are ‘a choice
forced on libraries by those with sufficient market power over them’ (Edwards
and Shulenburger, 2003: 14). Furthermore, once a library has signed the
contract the publisher practically has carte
blanche power to continually raise prices above the rate of inflation and
exert further market pressure. Even if libraries were able to raise budgets to
keep in step with the commercial publishers, due to the inelastic nature of demand
in the market, prices would simply be increased to absorb the additional funds
available in library budgets – all that would occur is a continual vicious
circle of ‘virulent price inflation’ (Edwards and Shulenburger, 2003: 15).
The libraries are trapped because generally it is not
possible to substitute one journal for another. Given that faculty members tend
to demand the top-tier titles, the only way a library has of responding to
increased prices is to reduce spending across the lower-tier titles and
purchase fewer monographs (Edwards and Shulenburger, 2003: 15). Unfortunately,
what is lost in the transaction is the potential for access to new ideas that
are not being disseminated through top-tier journals. In this way, library
holdings ‘are less reflective of innovation and more focused on established
research in mainstream areas’ (Edwards and Shulenburger, 2003: 15).
Increasingly, the ‘Big Deals’ are negotiated on behalf of
libraries by consortia (Phillips, 2009: 91). According to the website of the
Council of Australian University Libraries (CAUL) consortium, which represents
university and research libraries in Australia, a key objective is ‘maximising
the information resources available to researchers, and the facilitation of
their access.’ Similarly, the Great Western Library Alliance (GWLA) is a
consortium of thirty-three research libraries located in the central and
western United States, designed to deliver ‘cost-effective and high-quality
information services and resources to its member institutions and their
clientele’, and it states that one of the benefits of membership is ‘cost
savings related to cooperative negotiation of discounts and licensing terms and
conditions.’
According to Strieb and Blixrud (2013), ‘research libraries
have been spending millions of dollars per year licensing collections of
journals published by just a handful of publishers’, and that ‘there is no
question that these [bundles] are the most expensive purchases research
libraries are making with their materials dollars.’ Edlin and Rubinfield (2005:
441), argue that, ‘[b]undling can be seen as a device that erects a strategic
barrier to entry.’ In other words, ‘Big Deal’ contracts leave libraries with
little left over to purchase journals from new entrants.
In 2001, it was predicted that ‘Big Deals’ would result in
price increases to already highly priced commercial journals and that ‘an
annual price increase of 7% [would] double the cost’ of these deals over a
decade’ (Frazier, 2001). According to Cleary (2009: 368), this forecast is
‘only slightly above the 6% average increase’ experienced by the Queensland University
of Technology (QUT) on its four major deals during the five-year period to
2009. At the time, she noted that the university’s
Big Deals are incrementing at a
rate higher than the increases for the library’s resource budget, which has
grown by 35% between 2001 and 2008. The budget increase falls well short of the
42% required to keep up with average Big Deal expenditure and erodes the
Library’s ability to acquire new resources and formats (Cleary, 2009: 368).
Given the continuous price rises for journals and the
competing demands upon library resource budgets, ‘libraries have afforded Big
Deals in a trend that cannot be sustained’ (Cleary, 2009: 378). Libraries will
need to conduct research into the costs and benefits of unbundling their ‘Big
Deals’ from the commercial publishers, and through better use of usage
statistics, decide which resources they really need and how much they can
afford to pay for them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this essay has provided a discussion
surrounding arguments over the high cost of knowledge in Australia with
reference to the wider international context. In particular, it sought to
understand how and why academic journal publishing comes at such a high price
to the consumer. This was achieved by looking at the economics, structure and
market dynamics of journal publishing. It is clear from the above that due to
low price elasticity of demand, the big commercial publishers have been able to
maintain and extort the market to substantial financial gain. However, this
system can only survive so long as it has the support of those who provide the
‘free labour’, which at present seems tenuous and a possible threat to the
traditional model of commercial publishing. Whilst this paper has not been
focused on arguments over open access business models, if managed correctly,
these models could offer some relief to library budgets as access to scholarly
knowledge becomes more easily affordable, and in some cases, free. There is also
further opportunity for more detailed research into the Australian situation,
as most of the data available is dated. Ultimately, whilst their hegemonic
business practices are allowed to continue, commercial publishers will continue
to reap significant rewards from the system, and until there is significant
change, they will continue to operate with a licence to print money.
List of references
ABC (2012) ‘Academic
Journals and the Price of Knowledge’, Future Tense, radio program
transcript, Radio National, 10 June, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/academic-journals-and-the-price-of-knowledge/4053070#transcript,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Bergstrom, C.T. and Bergstrom, T.C. (2006) ‘The Economics
of Ecology Journals’, Frontiers in
Ecology and the Environment, 4 (9): 488-495.
Bosch, S. and Henderson, K. (2013) ‘The Winds of Change:
Periodicals Price Survey 2013’, Library
Journal, http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/04/publishing/the-winds-of-change-periodicals-price-survey-2013/,
accessed 14 June 2013.
CAUL (2013) ‘About
CAUL’, CAUL website, http://caulweb01.anu.edu.au/about-caul,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Cleary, C. (2009) ‘Why the “Big Deal” Continues to Persist’,
The Serials Librarian, 57: 364-379.
Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (2009) ‘Signs of Epistemic
Disruption: Transformations in the Knowledge System of the Academic Journal’ in
B. Cope and A. Phillips, The Future of
the Academic Journal. Oxford, Cambridge and New Delhi: Chandos Publishing:
13-61.
Cope, B. and Phillips, A. (2009) ‘Introduction’ in B. Cope
and A. Phillips, The Future of the
Academic Journal. Oxford, Cambridge and New Delhi: Chandos Publishing: 1-9.
Dasgupta, P. (2007) Economics: A Short Introduction. New
York and London: Oxford University Press.
Davies, E.D. (2009) ‘Libraries and the Future of the
Journal: Dodging the Crossfire in the e-Revolution, or Leading the Charge?’ in
B. Cope and A. Phillips, The Future of
the Academic Journal. Oxford, Cambridge and New Delhi: Chandos Publishing:
213-223.
Edlin, A.S. and Rubinfield,
D.L. (2005) ‘The Bundling of Academic Journals’, AEA Papers and Proceedings,
May 2005, http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/rubinfeldd/Profile/publications/bundlingofacademicjournals.pdf,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Edwards, R. and
Shulenburger, D. (2003) ‘The High Cost of Scholarly Journals (And What to Do
About It)’, Change, 35: 10-19.
Frazier, K. (2001) ‘The
Librarian’s Dilemma: Contemplating the Costs of the “Big Deal.”’ D-Lib
Magazine, 7(3), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Gower, T. (2012)
‘Elsevier – my part in its downfall’, weblog post, 21 January, Gowers’s Weblog,
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Gusterson, H. (2012)
‘Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 September, http://chronicle.com/article/Want-to-Change-Academic/134546/,
accessed 14 June 2013.
GWLA (2013) ‘About
GWLA’, GWLA website, http://www.gwla.org/about-gwla,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Hartwich, O. (2009) ‘Let Internet Replace Journals’, The Australian, 25 November, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion/let-internet-replace-journals/story-e6frgcko-1225803425489,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Hollier, N. (2012) ‘Reflections
on Academic Humanities Publishing‘, weblog post, 24 September, Monash University
Publishing, http://publishing.monash.edu/blog.html,
accessed 25 March 2013.
Houghton, J.W. (2001) ‘Crisis and Transition: the Economics
of Scholarly Communication’, Learned
Publishing, 14: 167-176.
James, S. (2011) ‘Flogging a Dead Book? Prospects for the
Scholarly Book and the University Press in Australia’, Journal of Scholarly
Publishing, 42 (2): 182-204.
Jha, A. (2012) ‘Academic
Spring: How an Angry Maths Blog Sparked a Scientific Revolution’, The Guardian, 9 April, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-scientific-journals,
accessed 20 April 2013.
Jinha, A.E. (2010) ‘Article 50 million: an Estimate of the
Number of Scholarly Articles in Existence’, Learned
Publishing, 23: 258-263.
John Wiley & Sons
(2011) Annual Report 2011, http://www.wiley.com/legacy/annual_reports/ar_2011/10kWiley2011.pdf,
accessed 14 June 2013.
King, D.W. (2007) ‘The Cost of Journal Publishing: a
Literature Review and Commentary’, Learned
Publishing, 20: 85-106).
King, D.W. and Tenopir, C. (1999) ‘Evolving Journal Costs:
Implications for Publishers, Libraries, and Readers’, Learned Publishing, 12: 251-258.
Martin, G. (2013) ‘Elsevier Journals: Has Anything Changed?’,
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/elsevier-journals-has-anything-changed/#more-4931, accessed 14 June 2013.
Marx, K. (n.d) “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” in Capital, Vol. 1, 13. No publisher
details: not paginated.
McCabe, M. (1998) ‘ARL
200: The Impact of Publisher Mergers on Journal Prices: A Preliminary Report’ http://staff.washington.edu/tabrooks/510.course/ARL/MergersPrices.htm, accessed 14 June 2013.
McCabe, M.J. (2002) ‘Journal Pricing and Mergers: A
Portfolio Approach’, The American
Economic Review, 92(1): 259-269.
McCabe, M.J., Nevo, A. and Rubinfield, D.L. (2006) ‘The
Pricing of Academic Journals’, Berkeley Program in Law and Economics,
Working Paper Series, http://mccabe.people.si.umich.edu/MNR.pdf,
accessed 14 June 2013.
McGuigan, G.S. and
Russell, R.D. (2008) ‘The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis
of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of
Scholarly Publishing’, Electronic Journal
of Academic and Special Librarianship, 9(3), http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguigan_g01.html,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Moghaddam, G.G. (2009) ‘Why Are Scholarly Journals Costly
Even With Electronic Publishing’, Interlending
and Document Supply, 37(3): 149-155.
Morgan Stanley (2002) Scientific Publishing: Knowledge
Is Power, http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/morganstanley.pdf,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Odlyzko, A. (1997) ‘The
Economics of Electronic Journals’, The
Economics of Electronic Journals, 2(8), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/542/463,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Panitch, J.M. and
Michalak, S. (2005) ‘The Serials Crisis’, A White Paper for the UNC-Chapel
Hill Scholarly Communication Convocation, http://www.unc.edu/scholcomdig/whitepapers/panitch-michalak.html,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Phillips, A. (2009) ‘Business Models in Journals Publishing’
in B. Cope and A. Phillips, The Future of
the Academic Journal. Oxford, Cambridge and New Delhi: Chandos Publishing:
87-103.
Pinfield, S. (2013) ‘Is Scholarly Publishing Going from
Crisis to Crisis?’, Learned Publishing,
26(2): 85-88.
Reed Elsevier (2012) Annual
Report 2012, http://reporting.reedelsevier.com/media/174016/reed_elsevier_ar_2012.pdf,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Research Information
Network (2006) ‘UK Scholarly Journals: 2006 Baseline Report: an Evidence-based
Analysis of Data Concerning Scholarly Journal Publishing’, http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/Journals-baseline-report.pdf,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Shipp, J. (2006) ‘Commercial Scholarly Publishing: the
Devil Incarnate or Divine Saviour’, History
of Economics Review, 32: 37-45.
Springer (2013) ‘Key
Facts’, Springer website, http://www.springer.com/about+springer/company+information/key+facts?SGWID=0-175806-0-0-0,
accessed 14 June 2013.
Steele, C. (2012), ‘Scholarly
Licence to Print Money’, The
Australian, 25 January, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion/scholarly-licence-to-print-money/story-e6frgcko-1226252771554,
accessed 25 March 2013.
Strieb, K.L. and Blixrud, J.C. (2013) ‘The State of
Large-Publisher Bundles in 2012’, Research
Library Issues, 282: 13-20.
SV POW (2012) ‘The Obscene Profits of Commercial Scholarly
Publishers’, weblog post, 13 January 2012, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the
Week (SV POW), http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/,
accessed 20 April 2013.
The Cost of Knowledge (2013), The Cost of Knowledge
website, http://thecostofknowledge.com/,
accessed 14 June 2013.
The Economist (2012) ‘Open Sesame’, 14 April, http://www.economist.com/node/21552574,
accessed 20 April 2013.
The Faculty Advisory
Council (2013) ‘Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained, Harvard
University, memorandum, http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448,
accessed 20 April 2013.
The Office of Fair
Trading (2002) The Market for Scientific, Technical and Medical Journals: a
Statement by the OFT, http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/reports/media/oft396.pdf,
accessed 20 April 2013.
