What is wrong with the present system?
Office of Fair Trading Report September 2002
- price increases above inflation
- large price disparity between commercial and non-commercial journals
- high profits for commercial STM publishing
- bundling of journals by commercial publishers, possibly hindering others from entering the market.
Notes:
No need to dwell on the issues of price, publishers’ policies and so on because we are all, all too familiar with them.
Support for this view from outside the academic community: the OFT
Can the scientific journals market work better? OFT report produced in September 2002 and discussed in The Scientist October 28th 2002
“Journals are the principal means by which scientific knowledge is disseminated. The market, which operates worldwide, has a number of features that suggest that competition may not be working effectively.”
The main concerns noted by the OFT are:
- price increases above inflation
- substantial price disparity between commercial journals and non-commercial journals
- high levels of profitability for commercial STM publishing (around 10-15 per cent above other forms of commercial journal publishing)
- bundling of a large selection of their journals by commercial publishers possibly hindering others from entering the market.