Michael Perelman wrote: > The financial times reported today that > High-quality scientific journals which are > "must-reads" for their subscribers are a highly > profitable business with margins as high as 40 per > cent. Jerry Levy wrote: That's very interesting, Michael (and fits-in rather well into a recent thread we have been having on the Post-Keynesian Thought list). Certainly it suggests that there may be monopolistic pricing at work. _________________ North_Holland ans Elsevier have been buying up publishing rights to academic journals for at least two decades. They have developed a significant degree of monopoly pricing ability as a result. Professional orgs, including URPE, have found the day-to-day tasks of putting together, printing and mailing a journal to be too much a hassle. So they farm it out to a journals firm. While this benefits the professional org in the short run, journal prices have been rising more than twice as fast as the rate of inflation. This is THE major cost squeeze affecting academic libraries around the country. When libraries have fixed budgets and rising journal costs, they cut the number of journals they order. Guess which ones they cut first! RRPE,JPKE,IRAE, etc. There was a fairly complete discussion of this issue about 2 years ago on PEN_L but I don't know if the archives go back that far Doug Orr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
