The Price of Knowledge
Does anybody know if scientific journals are making money lately?
I don’t have any idea. A lot of commercial print information sources are having serious troubles. There are reports, for example, that the San Francisco Chronicle is in deep trouble [http://sfist.com/2009/02/24/sf_chronicle_for_sale.php] and even venerable (if you can imagine that word in this context) Playboy may be up for sale. [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100906383&ft=1&f=1020] I’ve discussed before some of the troubles in journalism in general. But what I’m asking about today concerns the plethora of scientific and technical journals out there that seem to make up a huge industry.
The question came up because I came across a report that the International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation has a paper in an upcoming issue about how social networking could be used to discover prior art related to patent applications and thereby speed up the review process [http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/02/23/social.patents]. It seems there’s an enormous backlog of patent applications and there isn’t much hope of reducing it with current procedures.
I have some interest in this question because, thanks to my job, some of my colleagues and I have our names on some patent paperwork (applications not yet filed, so I can’t describe the work yet – too bad, it’s interesting stuff!) so I have some direct interest in the subject. The idea of using social networking to gather information about patents strikes me as being somewhat naive. There’s money in patents and that means there will be people more interested in gaming the system than in providing reasonable debate. Just look at how many studies a certain evil empire (that will remain nameless) has commissioned to “prove” that Linux (which is free) is more expensive than the evil empire’s very expensive commercial operating system and you get the idea.
But, there might be something more to the idea than described in the brief news article I saw, so I thought, as I often do, that I would see if I could get a look at the actual paper. This began a not unusual odyssey to try to download information from a company that hides information in order to jack up prices. Oooh! Did that sound a tiny bit less than complementary? My mistake. Let me rephrase: Thus began a futile search to find out the facts from a company that thinks that information, even when it appeals to only a very limited market, should be milked for ridiculous amounts of money. There. Does that sound better?
In this case, I found the article after a few clicks (quite a few. Why are these websites always so badly designed?). In order to actually view the content, however, I was offered the option to subscribe to the journal for 400 Euros a year (about $511.80) or to buy just that article for 30 Euros ($38.39 according to the online converter I used). I didn’t spend the money. I work for a living.
This is more or less the norm for peer-reviewed journals. There are a lot of them in the world. A high proportion of them seem to be put out by a small number of publishers. I’m not even making one of those “information wants to be free” arguments you see in some circles (though I have plenty of sympathy for the idea that knowledge should not be made artificially hard to get). I have nothing against paying a few dollars for a service or information I want. It costs money to produce, why shouldn’t the producers get some compensation for their trouble?
But $40 for a single electronic copy of an article? Electronic means the cost for printing is $0.00. That’s ZERO dollars. None.
There’s another force at work here of course. The majority of these kinds of journals are purchased by institutions – colleges and universities and sometimes big libraries. The print copies that are produced sit in boxes and are rarely – if ever – read by an actual human being. That is especially true now as more and more such content is made available on the Internet. Because I take online classes, I have access to a couple of such online repositories. None of them seemed to have this particular journal, though. Why would they? It doesn’t look like something that would have very high demand even among people interested in patents and new technology (like me).
And that’s my point. These journals seem to be a bad deal to me. They charge too much money for small amounts of niche information. Even university libraries have finite budgets. They must do at least some picking and choosing among journals. You would think (but then, maybe I’m too rational) that they would get more bang for the buck by choosing lower priced journals, or even none at all considering how rarely some of them really get used. It’s an economics thing. Scarce resources force us to choose those things that matter most. Even universities are feeling the economic crunch lately, or so I hear.
Let’s put it another way: If they had only wanted $5 for the article, I probably would have bought it. The sale was lost by setting the price far too high. Which brings us back to my original question: Are publishers of peer reviewed journals doing okay in the current economy, even when so much of the rest of the media is hurting?
My first reaction, on seeing the prices they wanted for a single article (let alone the outrageous price for a year’s subscription) was, “I hope not.”
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