From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 22:02:43 +0200

The model of scientific and scholarly publishing is, arguably, undergoing a
fundamental change.  Once upon a time, the business model was simple:
 publish high quality articles and convince as many people as possible to
subscribe to the journals in which they appear and raise the prices as high
as the market will bear.  We all know pretty well how that works.

But now an alternate model appears:  charge people to publish their
articles and give them away for free.  The fundamental change that implies
is that revenue enhancement will still come from charging whatever the
market will bear, but now the search is not for more subscribers but for
more authors.  Of course peer review intrudes into this model, but if you
could, for example, double the number of articles passing peer review for a
journal you publish, you could double your gross revenue.  That was mostly
not the case before except where the publisher had room to increase the
subscription price proportionately.  There's a slippery slope here.
Predatory journals have already gone over the edge on that slope and are in
a smoldering heap at the bottom of the hill, but the footing can get dicey for
the best of them.  Hence this story:

https://dailynous.com/2023/04/27/wiley-removes-goodin-as-editor-of-the-journal-of-political-philosophy/

Another dimension of the new model is explored in a piece in Clarke and
Esposito's *The Brief *(https://www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/vuca/), where
Clarivate's decision to "delist" journals from Web of Science is argued to
have a powerful negative effect on revenue for those journals as authors
who want their articles to rank highly take them elsewhere.  Is it time for
publishers to stop taking librarians to dinner and concentrate instead on
prolific authors?

Jim O'Donnell
ASU