From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 3 May 2013 20:02:02 +0100

A little more history which is not I think controversial.

Before WWII German journals were central to the international scholarly
discourse and they were mostly commercial. I can give the references.

In the UK going back into the C19 before WWII most UK journals were a little
more local but some international and they were published by some commercial
publishers like Longman, Macmillan and T&F and of course CUP and OUP. All
these publishers saw journals as a sideline and not very profitable.

Many learned societies published with commercial publishers as now and
perhaps as many in terms of percentages.

The big change came with the German model coming in through the US and the
Netherlands mediated by émigrés and of course through Pergamon from the
1950s. I have been doing work on this for a book chapter.

My first employer is a good example - Academic Press. AP set up in a hotel
room in Manhattan in 1942 with Advances in Cancer Research. AP set up in
London in 1959 with Journal of Molecular Biology.

Anthony

Anthony

-----Original Message-----

From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2013 03:05:02 -0400

I question this figure, Sandy. For example, the 6,000 academic journals
vetted by Latindex in Latin America are all supported by academic
institutions.

Also academic presses are not alone on the non-profit side of things:
association publications also exist, and they do not all behave like the
American Chemical Society.

I was using the example of U. presses in the US to show that, even there,
subsidies had existed until well after the 2nd WW.

Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal



-----Original Message-----

From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:30:47 -0500

And the amount of academic publishing done by university presses is dwarfed
by that done by for-profit, private companies. Yes, knowledge of history can
be helpful . . . . :)

Sandy Thatcher


At 6:11 PM -0400 4/30/13, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:03:17 -0400
>
> Public subsidies are already the case, to a greater or lesser extent,
> in many countries or groups of countries. For example: Canada, France,
> Italy, the countries of Latin America, Europe + South Africa
> supporting SciELO, etc...
>
> Perversely, these public subsidies sometimes go to supporting private
> companies (the French case is a very good example of this situation).
>
> The US will probably be the last country to adopt such a system, once
> Britain relents..., but the university presses of old used to be
> subsidized by public or non-profit universities. That was the idea
> behind the creation of Johns Hopkins University Press. Some knowledge
> of history can be helpful in this regard.
>
>
> Jean-Claude Guédon
> Professeur titulaire
> Littérature comparée
> Université de Montréal