From: Alex Holzman <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 22:50:50 -0500

I realize it's always fun to have a bogey man in the room, but really,
life is a lot more complicated than evil publishers and virtuous
librarians.  Heck, you could say it's all the faculty's fault for
producing all that mediocre output and then striving like mad to
publish it all solely to further their individual careers.  Or it's
the administration's fault for insisting, even at the U. of
Mediocrity, that the faculty keep publishing more and more--mediocre
or swell, really doesn't matter--instead of basing promotion, tenure,
and salary on quality--which is a lot harder to define than quantity
and means more work for the poor administrator.  Or it's peer
reviewers for falsely praising mediocrity. (BTW, if so much being sold
is truly mediocre, why fight so hard to make it open access?  To
spread mediocrity yet further?  Or is there justice in making
mediocrity creators--authors--pay?)  Or it's librarians who for
reasons I'll never understand actually sign NDAs!  Why dear friends,
do you ever consent to those instruments?  And if publishers started
removing material from bundles whose price increase was capped at 5%,
why not sue?  Immediately and collectively.

All sorts of greed, manipulation, ignorance, apathy and any number of
vices have been operating throughout our scholarly ecosystem.  It is,
after all, a human activity.  What is surprising is that we haven't
found better mechanisms to keep things within the bounds of acceptable
inefficiencies and greed.  I say that with zero sense of cynicism;
well-run systems usually work because they minimize the downside of
what we humans do and privilege the upside--and out better angels turn
out to be able to create thos systems.  In real life there are
actually darn few pure villains or heroes.  But how cool that to one
degree or another all the constituencies in scholar world have become
so much more aware of the systemic problems and in many cases are
working together to privilege the good.  Even some publishers....

One last thing--it would be nice if folks would recognize that
university presses possess their very own set of incompetencies, but
that lust for filthy lucre really isn't among them.  The distinctions
between commercial and university publishers are many and not always
flattering to up's but that's a conversation for another day, though
I'd start with the simple fact that every university press is, well,
part of the university.  Just like the academic library!  Stereotyping
any group, including publishers, is at best lazy, at worst dangerous;
a shortcut to a desired, though too often inaccurate conclusion.

Go in peace, friends.

My two cents,

Alex Holzman
Director
Temple University Press
Phone: 215-926-2145
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.temple.edu/tempress


On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 7:22 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: "Hamaker, Charles" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 12:04:49 +0000
>
> John Abbott gets it about right. Publishers will and do lie and
> subvert any system, gaming them at their leisure. In the mid-eighties
> Stuart Grinnell and I published research showing that Pergamon over a
> 5 year period had prices invariably going "up" based on who knows
> what, but from their propaganda, because of increased output. ( or the
> funniest, increased postage costs from Europe...Weren't most
> publishers at that time drop shipping from East Asia??) But as we
> tracked the number of journal articles over a period (5 years if I
> remember correctly) we found that the number of articles in their
> journals seemed to increase or decrease without regards to pricing,
> prices which were completely separate, always going up, almost in a
> straight line year over year.  Never of course going down when output
> dropped. Similarly with Michael Mabes famous number estimating a year
> over year growth in the journal system of articles correlating with
> number of increaes in scientists, I seem to remember that at about 3%
> a year, a number you couldn't correlate with ISI's measures of journal
> article output. But 10%, 15% and even more price increases un related
> to output measures. Now publisher's have found a new way to subvert
> what was supposed to be a win win situation, the big deal. First of
> all slap an NDA so no one can systematically show what the real price
> increases are then immediately start planning how to get beyond that
> 5% cap in the license.  One example,  just remove a portion of your
> output where you REALLY want more than 5% a year. Make it must have
> content, (there actually is still some of that) and off to the races.
> The cap, in case anyone cares to remember was to protect library
> budgets. Ha Ha very funny our publisher friends respond. The no
> cancellation clauses were to protect publishers.  So a win win. But in
> practice as John implies below,  perversion of the clear intentions at
> least in the goals of libraries. I realize this probably needs a whole
> article detailing all the ways in which publishers have subverted  the
> intent of these license agreements, but we'd still have publisher
> agents provacateur arguing, but look we produce more so proportionally
> we have to charge more. NO such thing of course as savings based on
> volume, those all go to the publisher side of the equation. You'd
> think 5% a year would be enough for anyone, but no, not at all. I've
> got publishers that are clocking in once again at those 10% to 15% a
> year increases. Anyone else? --Don't tell me their names, they might
> sue you for NDA ....!!!
> Chuck Hamaker