Jane, In the past, professional societies made most of their money by selling institutional subscriptions; personal subscriptions were usually sold at the marginal cost of printing and mailing the journals. The profits from these subscriptions subsidized most of the activities of the society, including meetings, public outreach, etc. This was simply the business model.
As libraries began to be squeezed by reduced funds and the ever increasing number of journals, institutional subscriptions began declining, even before electronic publishing. Although the labor costs associated with journal production have declined somewhat by moving away from paper and old publishing methods, the decline is not as great as one might think. Good editorial staff is still expensive. None of this was transparent to the people paying the bills. It was just the way the system worked. Professional societies now have to rely on making money from meetings and are struggling with different subscription models, including the absurd cost of an individual article. It isn't just about the marginal cost of pushing electrons, it is also about demand for the information. This is the free market at work. As to whether research paid for with tax dollars should be open access, that is a different question. The alternative funding mechanism is that the authors pay the cost of publication (which gets billed to the grant and hence paid for with tax money). That reduces all journals to a vanity press. If the authors pay, why shouldn't all articles get published? I know the answer to that, but you appreciate the temptation for publishers if we go to a fully author-financed system. There aren't any easy answers here. Open access solves some problems but creates others. My two cents, Rick Hooper _________________________________________________ Richard Hooper Ph.D. Executive Director CUAHSI 196 Boston Avenue, Suite 2100 Medford, MA 02155 e: [email protected] p: +1.202.777.7306 f: 202.777.7308 w: www.cuahsi.org-----Original Message----- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jane Shevtsov Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 12:27 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] ESA Position on Open Access On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 7:32 AM, David L. McNeely <[email protected]> wrote: > The money that ESA and other scholarly organizations charge for > electronic copies of their reports goes to support the organization. The > organization makes possible the publication and decimination of new > knowledge. There are costs involved, whether or not you think that the > only thing the organization has to pay is for the electrical power to zip > electrons around. Yes, the incremental cost of pushing out another copy is > small. But all the infrastructure of the organization is involved in > getting there, and is at stake if we succomb to the idea that only the > incremental cost should be paid by the user. > Then what did ESA and other publishers do before widespread Internet use? Back then, people would go to the library and, if the library subscribed, photocopy the articles they needed. They paid the library for copies, but publishers saw none of that money. And if they just read the article without copying it, they paid nothing at all! Jane Shevtsov -- ------------- Jane Shevtsov Ecology Ph.D. candidate, University of Georgia co-founder, www.worldbeyondborders.org "She has future plans and dreams at night. They tell her life is hard; she says 'That's all right'." --Faith Hill, "Wild One"
