From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 21:03:17 -0400

I don't know what Hindawi's finances look like, but if they indeed
have a 50% margin, more power to them. But let't not overlook that
Hindawi is an open access publisher. High margins at H, if they indeed
have them, thus cannot be due to a monopoly or the sale of
aggregations.

In general, I find discussions of publishing not to be anchored in
evidence. That doesn't mean that the positions of OA advocates are
wrong; it simply means that they are ill-informed.

Joe Esposito

On Tue, Aug 8, 2017 at 7:41 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: "Jan Erik Frantsvåg" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 08:50:09 +0000
>
> Joe,
> Thanks for responding!
>
> It is difficult to come up with numbers, as superprofit actually is a
> very theoretical concept, depending on possible profits from
> conceivable alternative uses of the firm's assets. (Long time since my
> economics classes, apologies for inaccuracies here ...). But with an
> operating profit of nearly 40 per cent, I find it highly improbable
> that there is no superprofit in Elsvier's scholarly publishing
> activities.
>
> Others may have higher levels of profit - I think Hindawi had around
> 50 per cent last time I saw numbers - and many will have lower profit
> levels. My *hunch* is that the major publishers have profit levels
> that amount to superprofits, while smaller ones generally don't - and
> some operate at a loss. I would assume superprofits to be closely
> associated with the ability to sell packages (also with control over
> high IF journals, prestige etc.). So we pay too much for packages, and
> have too little left to buy from the smaller publishers, striving to
> make a decent profit.
>
> Superprofits are hardly earned, and in the case of scholarly
> publishing I think we could safely assume that they generally stem
> from control over natural monopolies, as individual journals are.
>
> [Now, talking of costs and prices as if they were the same and there
> was any necessary connection between them, is a fallacy. The price I
> meet for an iPhone is a result of the general willingness to pay for
> it at the current time in the market I am a part of – Apple knows how
> to use price discrimination between markets and over time, as most
> other sellers of consumer electronics.]
>
>
> Best,
> Jan Erik
>
> -----Opprinnelig melding-----
> From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2017 20:26:17 -0400
>
> I believe that the amount of money going to "scam" OA publishers is
> small. Not zero, but small. It should be stopped, but it's hardly the
> biggest problem in scholarly communications today.
>
> I also agree with Jan that traditional publishers "stuff" their
> packages with lower quality journals. That indeed is one (not the only
> one) reason for large aggregations in the first place. But librarians
> are very good about studying usage and negotiating on the basis of
> that usage. So I think that "stuffing" is also a small matter.
>
> As for "super-profits," what are the numbers? Everyone always talks
> about Elsevier's huge profit margins, but I know of many publishers
> (professional societies and university presses) that lose money on
> journals. Does the industry *as a whole* make money? I don't know. But
> I would not be so quick to talk about super-profits without the data.
>
> Even assuming that there are indeed "super-profits," is it not
> possible that they are earned? Do you begrudge Apple the cost of an
> iPhone or HBO the price of a subscription? "Game of Thrones" comes on
> in a half-hour: to my mind (at least at this instant) HBO is quite a
> bargain. I feel the same about The New England Journal of Medicine,
> Science, and Nature. As Gertrude Stein never said, a bargain is a
> bargain is a bargain.
>
> Joe Esposito