

Low acceptance rates, commercial publishing... scholarly communication [pdf] - pseut
http://www.accessecon.com/includes/CountdownloadPDF.aspx?PaperID=EB-12-00810

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pseut
tl;dr: "most journals are sold under “big deal” contracts in which publishers
in effect give libraries all or nothing offers to subscribe to their whole
catalog in a given field rather than allowing librarians or consortia to chose
their subscriptions journal by journal. See the work of Ted Bergstrom and
Preston McAfee[1] on this for more details. What the exact incentives of the
publishers are here is not entirely clear. They seem to care weakly about the
over-all quality of the bundle, but they get little or no extra revenue from
increasing page counts. Thus, the decision to starve journals for pages in
light of strongly increasing submission rates is driven by the commercial
interests of the publisher and is entirely contrary to the mission of
fostering scholarly communication. This is a new, and I think compelling,
reason to try to reclaim scholarly communication back from commercial
publishers and into the community of scholars, and is the main point I would
like to be taken from this letter."

edit: additional summary

The letter starts with the position that journals have become irrelevant for
scholarly communication, which has been my experience in Economics, although I
get the impression from other people here that that's not universal across
fields. But (again from TFA), despite being irrelevant for communication,
journals are important for promotion, hiring, etc., and that their low
acceptance rates are causing serious problems. It then argues (and this is the
quotation I pulled out) that commercial publishers are a big reason for those
low acceptance rates, so they've got to go.

[1] <http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/BundleContracts.html>

