Academic publishing costs & the blind man’s bluff

Just one more feather in the hat that the “serials crisis is NOT over.”

There’s an article on WIRED from last October outlining the similarities between 1950s auto prices and the private US health care business. In essence, the similarity is that consumers have no way of knowing what the goods and services they are paying for actually cost. For auto purchases, this was resolved in the 1950s when US Congress passed a law requiring auto dealers to place the manufacturer’s suggested retail price on the sticker. WIRED is now pointing to advocates who want the same for health care. Giant health care providers are charging wildly different costs for the same services to patients who have no way of knowing what the true costs are.

One cannot help but notice a similar “blind man’s bluff” happening in academic publishing. A recent Nature News feature tried to pin down some of those unknown publishing costs. And in an Oxford debate held a few weeks ago, Stephen Curry (Imperial College) pointed out that his own library was bound by an NDA to not disclose Elsevier’s contract details with other libraries. That of course is big publishing’s questionably legal practice to maintain the blind man’s bluff across universities. Prevent libraries from knowing what others pay (and thus estimating true costs) and you can continue to charge more.

As noted in the Nature News feature, the big 4 publishers partly justify this based on the complexity of their businesses that span more than just academic publishing. They say accounting for overheads that span multiple disparate business units is too complex to figure out how much is being spent on STM publishing alone. One finds this hard to believe and should probably give shareholders in those organizations a pause for concern. Either they truly don’t know their costs to publish, and thus can’t reliably run a sustainable business; or they just have never been pushed to release those numbers (as it would potentially lower revenues). Either way, it is fishy business that is arguably harming the consumer, just as it was prior to the 1950s auto sticker law.

Perhaps it is time that government demands publishers over a certain revenue threshold start revealing their true costs. Is it time for academic publishing to have its own “auto sticker?” The alternative is that we continue the blind walk in the dark.