From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2015 19:56:46 +0000

Rick

The report is rather old and so I wouldn’t want to vouch that the data
reported necessarily represent the current picture, but back in 2004
ALPSP published the results of a survey that looked at the size of
publishing surpluses for society journals.  A third of respondents
subsidised their publishing operations, while for those that did make
money publishing represented 20-30% on total society income.

The report is available at:

http://www.alpsp.org/Ebusiness/ProductCatalog/nfpSurpluses.aspx?ID=48

David

David C Prosser
Executive Director, RLUK


On 8 Mar 2015, at 19:09, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2015 15:50:28 +0000
>
> Dear Collective Wisdom,
>
> I recently heard a presentation by a learned-society officer who
> mentioned, in passing, that many society and non-profit scholarly
> publishers are operating some or all of their journals at a loss. This
> took me a bit by surprise; I’ve never doubted that there are scholarly
> journals out there not earning their keep financially (and being kept
> afloat for purposes of mission rather than revenue), but I got the
> impression that there may be more of these out there than I thought.
>
> Has anyone studied this? Is there data out there on the
> number/percentage of scholarly journals that are subsidized by their
> host organizations rather than generating a surplus for them?
>
> Thanks in advance for any leads on this.
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
> Marriott Library, University of Utah
> [log in to unmask]