I’m reminded of the time some years ago when a colleague made a motion during the Medical Library Association business meeting that MLA stop allowing publishers with unacceptably high margins to exhibit at the annual meeting. When queried about what an acceptable threshold might be, there was no clear answer. Marty Frank (formerly with the American Physiological Society) mentioned one time in a presentation that the APS bylaws specified that the journals program recover a certain surplus – I think it was 8%. This was then used to help fund some of the various other educational activities the Society engaged in. Of course, for some of my librarian colleagues, even that amount is too high. But that’s an emotional argument, not an economic one.
On Jan 30, 2019, at 6:49 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2019 13:09:30 -0700The estimable Peter Potter of Virginia Tech was on our campus last week for an excellent talk and discussion on current issues in open access. A few questions from the discussion might have wider interest and I'd be glad for comments.1. We are now regularly reminded of the size of the profit margins of major publishers. There seems wide agreement that a margin over 30% is problematic. What would be an acceptable profit margin for a publisher to sustain without remonstration?2. In the current negotiations, Plan S or otherwise, the current publishers look to maintain their role in the marketplace for information, while switching, flipping, or transforming their business models. What if a major publisher with a high profit margin were to devise a model that provided full and immediate and S-compliant open access, but it emerged that their profit margin either stayed about the same or increased? What should be the position of libraries and research institutions in that eventuality?3. If we imagine a successful transformation of a very high percentage of current journal publication to S-compliant open access, should we expect or hope that the quantity of articles published will increase, decrease, or stay about the same? Would a decrease be acceptable?Jim O'DonnellASU