From: Michael Magoulias <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2015 20:36:46 +0000

Dear Rick,

Yes, this is indeed the case for a number of journals in academic
publishers' portfolios. Even in the case of Chicago with about 65
journals, we effectively subsidize a fair number. Some of these are
recently launched journals, and they typically take 3-5 yrs before
breaking even. Others, however, are in the red because the publisher
has an agreement in place with the society by which the society is
guaranteed a certain amount of money regardless of revenue and costs.
The goal of a university press is to have a portfolio in which enough
journals are in the black so that its costs are covered overall.

With commercial presses (or some significant non-profits who have
adopted the ways of the commercial firms), the need to achieve
impressive bottom-line results from year to year means that perennial
cost-cutting is a fact of life. This has led to a great deal of
outsourcing (or wholesale elimination) of once important core
activities such as copy-editing, or significant reductions in
marketing, where the ROI is difficult to quantify.

In terms of publicly available data, I would be very surprised is
anything meaningful exists, since the details would be considered
highly confidential.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
Michael

Michael Magoulias
Director, Journals
University of Chicago Press


> On Mar 8, 2015, at 2:24 PM, 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]