This morning, by way of @SimonBayly, I came across the article “Towards fairer capitalism: let’s burst the 1% bubble” in yesterday’s Guardian.
There’s a nice late 1800s/early 1900s quote that I can’t help but correlate with today’s academic publishers:
“The barbarous gold barons do not find the gold, they do not mine the gold, they do not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belongs to them.”
- Haywood, William D. The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood. New York: International Publishers, 1929, p. 171
What this is saying, and the thesis of the Guardian article, is that the gold barons of the 19th Century and the financial bankers of the 21st century are wealth extractors, rather than wealth creators.
The Guardian thesis goes on:
Value creation is about reinvesting profits into areas that create new goods and services, and allow existing goods to be produced with higher quality and lower cost.
Think about that. When was the last time we saw academic journals lower their prices? Subscription-based (and in cases even Open Access based) academic publishing is the opposite of value creation, it is value extraction.
The byproduct of innovation of the Internet has turned a wealth creating industry of academic publishing into a wealth extracting one. Make no mistake, today’s publishing executives are equal to yesterday’s gold barons and hedge fund managers. The Internet has given publishers the opportunity to lower prices, but they’ve chosen to do the opposite. That’s value extracted from scientists.
An important aspect of the Guardian thesis on economics isn’t that profits are inherently bad, but that they need to be reinvested to create more value.
I’d like to think this is what we are trying to do at PeerJ by creating value for the community. We made the price ridiculous at $99 for lifetime publishing. You’re forced to innovate with a price tag like $99. What’s more, we’re experimenting with free publishing as well with PrePrints (non peer-reviewed and non-typeset academic articles).
The thing is, we don’t know what the right price is for academic publishing today [1]. I don’t think it is what subscription journals have been charging, or most Open Access journals have been charging for that matter either. I suppose the thesis, of hedge fund managers and academic publishers robbing value, shall be proven if PeerJ continues to survive.
If you’re not lowering your prices then you’re not innovating. And if you’re not innovating, then you’re not creating value.
Footnotes:
1. It’s definitely not free, as it costs money to run servers and pay staff who maintain those servers, etc. ArXiv (non peer-reviewed) is a good example of what the right price might be, though even they have substantial costs that need support.