[IRTalk] Big Publishers, Bigger Profits: How the Scholarly Community Lost the Control of its Journals | Larivière | MediaTropes

[Hilton Gibson]

Despite holding the potential to liberate scholarly information, the
digital era has, to the contrary, increased the control of a few for-profit
publishers. While most journals in the print era were owned by academic
institutions and scientific societies, the majority of scientific papers
are currently published by five for-profit publishers, which often exhibit
profit margins between 30%-40%. This paper documents the evolution of this
consolidation over the last 40 years, discusses the peculiar economics of
scholarly publishing, and reflects upon the role of publishers in today’s
academe.

http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/26422
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lib.sun.ac.za/pipermail/irtalk/attachments/20160408/aa32915a/attachment.html>