Academic Medicine for Dodos

[Ted Bergstrom <tedb@econ.ucsb.edu>]

``At last the Dodo said, 'everybody has won, and all must have 
prizes.'''--Lewis Carroll, //Alice in Wonderland//

Lisa Dittrich of Academic Medicine says:

    This was one of my big problems with B&M's letter in the first
    place, and  what made me question their whole premise--they simply
    didn't seem to understand how the publishing world worked. So when I
    thought they also  got the names of the publishers wrong, too, I
    thought, "who are these dodos?" Now, there's an ad hominem attack.
    I've just been holding back.

We confess that we had not thought of ourselves as belonging to that 
lamented species;  but Lewis Carroll's dodo has a certain charm.

Although we may not fully "understand how the publishing world works", we 
think we understand quite a lot about the economics of this industry and 
are always pleased to learn more from insiders.

In our initial version of http://www.journalprices.com/ we listed journals 
published by Wolters Kluwer with both Wolters Kluwer and Springer-Kluwer 
named as publishers..  This was a slip on our part. As Mary Munroe 
explains in her excellent website on publisher mergers, 
http://www.niulib.niu.edu/publishers/Kluwer.htm Wolters Kluwer sold Kluwer 
Academic Publishing to Candover-Cinven in 2003, when Candover-Cinven also 
purchased BertelsmannSpringer. However Wolters Kluwer retained its 
publications in the medical sector, including Lippincott, Williams and 
Wilkens.. Jan Velterop of Springer graciously pointed out this out to us 
and we corrected the listing on our website several days ago.  If you look 
at our site, you will see that LWW journals are listed as published by 
Wolters Kluwer and not by Springer-Kluwer.

Ms Dittrich raises a second issue:

    So here's another, even more important one: the whole concept of "for
    profit" and "not for profit" is entirely off. They say my journal is
    for profit--it is not. I pointed this out to them; they did not
    correct it.  According to B&M, any journal published by one of the big
    houses is "for profit." This simply isn't true. Many not-for-profit
    journals use big houses to handle what they are not equipped to do:
    manage subscriptions, advertising sales, promotions, putting the
    journal online, printing, mailing, etc. This does not change their
    non-profit, society based status. But B&M don't make this distinction.
    So all of the data is skewed.

We have now changed the reported status of //Academic Medicine// to 
non-profit. We realize that some journals that published by for-profit 
organizations are actually owned by non-profit organizations. . Therefore 
tables, like those that Phil Davis constructed, that show average cost by 
publisher may be somewhat misleading.  For the most part, we suspect, the 
effect of inclusion of some society-owned journals among thoe publications 
of large commercial publishing houses is to understate average price per 
citation or article for these publishers.

It would be good to have better information about journal ownership. We 
know of no archive that classifies commercially published journals by 
whether they are owned by the publisher or published for a non-profit 
society.  In our own field, economics, we corresponded with a large number 
of editors and were able to determine ownership for most journals. 
Presumably this could be done in other fields.  If anyone is able to help 
us to identify journals that are owned by non-profit societies and 
published by for-profit publishers, we would be glad to incorporate this 
information into our database.

While it would be good to know more about the ownership of individual 
academic journals, it is important to understand that the profit status of 
the publisher is not the essence of our report.  A journal's performance 
index is determined by its cost per citation and cost per article and not 
by its profit status.  In making purchasing decisions, we believe that 
most librarians will focus on whether a journal is a good buy or a bad buy 
and not on who owns it.  Some journals owned by commercial journals are 
good buys. Some journals owned by societies are bad buys.

We believe that publicly available price comparisons are likely to improve 
incentives of non-profit and for-profit publishers alike--But then, you 
might expect dodos to believe things like that.


Cheers,
Ted Bergstrom