Journal of Economic Methodology 9:3, 265±273 2002 The economics of scienti®c publication: Introduction Esther-MirjamSent and Arjo Klamer
Abstract Whereasmethodological discussions of scienti® c publicationfrequently occurin an institutional vacuum, in the sense that they take little account of the processwhereby scienti® c contributionsare published,this symposium illuminates theurgency of focusing on theincreased dominance of commercialconsiderations inscienti® c publicationin particular and science in general. It stresses the importanceof embarking upon a multi-disciplinaryevaluation that starts from acontextualperspective, looks at developments in sciences other than just economics,and goes beyond attributing everything to technologicalchanges. Keywords: publishing,science, serials crisis, monograph crisis, economics of science
Publish or perish ...perhaps the realityof the academicrat raceis not quite as grimas suggested bythis clicheÂ,but publishing does constitute animportant activityin our scienti®c lives.As the same time, the world of publishing shows astark contrast between surplus and shortage. Eachyear publishers begin new monograph series yetthe libraries areunable to accommodate the increasing supply. Some publishers arecutting back whileothers enthusias- ticallyembrace whichever book proposal makes it their way.Many manu- scripts ®nd eagerpurchasers in Asia whileAmerican and European academics’ budgets do not allowthem to buy these books. Scientists seeking journal outlets for their research arewitnessing anincrease in publishing possibilities. At the same time, their piles of articles to be read arecluttering their o ces in amore and more alarmingmanner. Moreover, librarians’ budgets arenot growingat the same pace asthe number and prices of journals. Whereas methodological discussions of scienti®c publication frequently occur in aninstitutional vacuum, in the sense that they take little account of the process whereby scienti®c contributions arepublished, this mini- symposium illuminates the urgency of focusing on the increased dominance of commercial considerations in scienti®c publication in particular and science in general.The developments outlined abovehave given rise to the so-called serials and monograph crises. The former refers to the mismatch between journal prices and librarybudgets. The latter describes decreased
Journalof Economic Methodology ISSN 1350-178Xprint/ ISSN 1469-9427online # 2002Taylor & FrancisLtd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI:10.1080/ 1350178022000015096 266 Articles publishing possibilities for academicbooks aswellas anincreased focus on pro®t-making. And these developments area re¯ection of wider changes that havebeen occurring in the generalstructure, organization, and funding of science. Before discussing these changes, let us illustrate the mounting strains and tensions within the world of scienti®c publication through afew stories. Consider the ¯urry of lawsuits ®led bythe Gordon and Breach Publishing Group againstthe American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. The litigation concerned the rights of professional societies, who are themselves publishers, to prepare and print comparative price datafor journals. The trouble started when Henry Barschall,a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin atMadison, conducted astudy comparing the prices of physics journals that appeared in both PhysicsToday (Barschall 1988),which is the journal of the American Institute of Physics, and the Bulletinof the American Physical Society (Barschalland Arrington 1988), which, asits name suggests, is published under auspices of the American PhysicalSociety. Barschall’sstudy found that the journals published by Gordon and Breachhad the highest averagecost per character aswell as the highest averageratio of cost to impact. It concluded that journals of scienti®c societies, such asthe American Institute of Physics and the American PhysicalSociety, aremore cost-e ective than those of commercial publishers. Gordon and Breach® led alawsuitcharging a ¯awedmethodol- ogy,a skewed choice of journals, and incomplete research. Alower court dismissed the case,ruling that the two societies appearingas defendants in the lawsuithad not engagedin unfair competition. Afederal appeals court upheld the decision, based on the argument that the articles were constitutionally protected free speech. This wasnot the end of the societies’ legalhassles, for Gordon and Breachalso ®led lawsuits chargingfalse comparative advertising in countries in which this is illegal,namely Germany, Switzerland, and France.The cases weredismissed in Germany and Switzerland, but the one in Franceis still pending the settlement of the estate of Henry Barschall,who passed awayamidst allthe legalbattles. The plot thickens when it was discovered that Gordon and Breach had used stationary belonging to the Foundation for International Scienti®c Cooperation for asurveysent to university libraries askingthem whether they had canceled journal subscrip- tions because of Barschall’sreports. This prompted the Association of Research Libraries to send amemorandum to its members informing them that the surveycould be used to assess damagesfor future litigation. In fact, the Association had itself issued areport on journal prices in which Gordon and Breachpublications werefound to be among the most expensive. Yet, the result of the publisher’s actions and threats has been to deter librarians and others from engagingin additional analysesof the costs of scholarly journals. For instance, libel lawsuitthreats issued byGordon and Breachled the American Mathematical Society to exclude Gordon and Breachfrom several of its surveys of the costs for mathematical journals. When the society did Theeconomics of scienti®c publication 267 include the publisher’s numbers in one of the surveys that appeared in Notices oftheAmerican Mathematical Society ,Gordon and Breach,as wemay expect bynow, demanded aretraction and investigated litigation possibilities. It went asfar ascriticizing the results in atwo-page advertisement with the heading `AMS Continues Gross Distortions in Surveys; Abrogates Agreement with Gordon and Breach’(Gordon and Breach1990). Now, the previous story is certainly not anisolated aair, for it is easyto ®nd other stories such asthe following. The playersin this one areElsevier, the Association for LogicProgramming, and the Journalof LogicProgramming (Bergstra 2000;Birman 2000).Upon its foundation in 1986,the Association for LogicProgramming adopted the then 2-year-old Journalof Logic Programming ,which waspublished byElsevier, as its `house journal’. In the beginning libraries paid $0.28per pagefor their subscription; by1999 this price had gone up to $0.88per page(Birman 2000).While the consumer price index increased roughly 44per cent over the period of adecade, the price charged to libraries went up about 158per cent over the same period. This prompted Krzysztof Apt, the president of the Association for LogicPro- gramming,and Maurice Bruynooghe, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of LogicProgramming ,to enter into negotiations with Elsevierover the price of librarysubscriptions. Elsevierdid not renege, arguingthat it o ers libraries attractivepackage deals and manyadditional services. The 16-month negotiations cameto anabrupt end when Bruynooghe resigned aseditor- in-chief and wasfollowed bythe entire ®fty-member editorial board. Theyall moved to CambridgeUniversity Press to found anew house journal for the Association for LogicProgramming, Theoryand Practice of LogicProgram- ming,with asubscription price of 45per cent of the old price. Elsevier continued its journal under anew name, Journalof Logic and Algebraic Programming ,and with anew editorial team. It then accused the Association for LogicProgramming of frustrating its attempts to keep the journal going bydiscouraging its members from joining the editorial board. In a®naltwist to this narrative,the 2000P± A± M Award of the Physics±Astronomy± Mathematics Division of the Special Libraries Association recognized Bruynooghe, his editorial board, and the Association for LogicProgramming for acknowledging the problems that increasing journal costs cause for both libraries and scholars, and for taking steps within their own scholarly community to e ect positive change.Again, this story is not anisolated incident. In 1999,the editor and editorial board of EvolutionaryEcology , a journal published byKluwer, resigned to start EvolutionaryEcology Research , which became solely their intellectual and ®nancialresponsibility (Rosenzweig 1999). EvolutionaryEcology was® rst published in 1984by Chapman & Hall,with Michael Rosenzweig asits originator aswell as editor-in-chief. In 1987,Chapman &Hallsu ered ahostile takeover bythe International Thomson Corporation. Elevenyears later, the publisher wassold to Kluwer. 268 Articles
All along,the hapless editor watched the subscription price of his brainchild goup and up. Rosenzweig (1999)estimated that in1998the cost of producing and distributing EvolutionaryEcology wasless than $80,000,whereas subscription revenues were somewhere between $250,000and $300,000, amounting to a275per cent markup, or a73.3per cent pro®t margin. Rosenzweig decided that enough wasenough and beggedand pleaded with Kluwer to sell the journal to auniversity press, but to no avail.The editor and his editorial board decided to jump ship and start EvolutionaryEcology Research,with the support of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Theylowered the subscription price for acombination of hard copy and Internet access from $800to $305. Theyalso o ered anInternet subscription for $272,an option that had not been availablefor EvolutionaryEcology .The new journal’s website (http://www.evolutionary-ecology.com) o ers the following clari®cation on pricing: `As aSPARC partner, wearetrying to help reduce the high prices of commercial journals. Eachpage of EER costs alibrarythat subscribes less than $0.26(US). That’s aprice that manythought became extinct with the dinosaurs! It is less than half the price often charged for similar scienti®c journals’. Now, the commercialization evidenced bythe narrativesso far has certainly not remained isolated to the publication of journals bycommercial presses (Thatcher 1990;Winkler 1997;Collier 1999;Schri rin 1999).In fact, the so-called serials crisis waspreceded bywhat has been labeled the monograph crisis. For instance, Andre Schri rin, managingdirector of Pantheon Books, which wasknown for focusing on cultural rather than economic valuein its publication decisions, wasforced to resign byRandom House, the corporate parent of Pantheon Books, for havingrun up large losses for too long. At the same time, university presses, which used to be supported bytheir host universities, areincreasingly expected to make ®nancialcontributions to their hosts. Combined with cost increases, amore and more monopolistic market asa result of the concentration of ownership of publishing houses, anincreasingly monopsonistic market due to declining librarypurchases, and the concentration of bookstore ownership, these developments aremaking it nearlyimpossible for the presses to continue publishing asmanymonographs. For instance, Oxford University Press has decided to stop publishing contemporary poetry aswellas several imprints and series. Rutgers University Press discontinued the publication of scholarly monographs with lowexpected sales.Louisiana State University Press focuses on popular novels such asits Confederacyof Dunces .The shift from culture to pro®t, from smallacademic audiences to largecommercial ones, or from specialized scholarly monographs to popular trade books has been so widespread and alarmingthat the Association of American University Presses, sponsored bythe Andrew W.Mellon Foundation, is currently conducting a4-yearstudy of the monograph crisis. Theeconomics of scienti®c publication 269
We could ®llan entire issue of the Journalof EconomicMethodology with further frightening illustrations of the monograph and serials crises, but would then be doing you adisservice. Instead, webelieve it is important to stress that the situation in which scienti®c publication currently ®nds itself is representative of changes that havebeen taking place in the generalstructure, organization, and funding of science. What the world of scienti®c publication in particular and academiain generalare witnessing is ashift from the `Cold War regime’ to the so-called globalized privatization regime (Sent 1999; Mirowski and Sent 2002).In the process, the military±university complex has been superseded byan industry±university connection, the protection of `pure science’ has been replaced bya desire to make money, and the freedom of information supposedly characterizing science has been threatened by e orts to commodify knowledge. It comes asno surprise, then, that the structure, organization, and funding of scienti®c publication arechanging alongwith the shift to the new regime. In our opinion, these transitions are much more signi®cant that anypresumed information revolution (Standage AQ1 1998).With the end of the cold war,the decline in militaryfunding, the hostility towards government interference, skepticism about the telos of science, questions about the accountability of science, and the push to develop connections between business and science, the monograph and serials crises could not lagfar behind. These events must cause those interested in the economics of scienti®c publication to confront atleast four sets of issues. First, studies of the economics of scienti®c publication that focus exclusivelyon the individual incentives of the various actors involved in the process cannot but provide a verylimited perspective on developments in the world of scienti®c publication (Gans 2000).The same holds for statistical analysesof citation patterns and the like that also ignore the importance of contextual changes (Gans 2000). Second, wemayconsider the publication of books and journals asatopic in industrial organization (Machlup 1962;Berg 1972; Ordover and Willig1978; Machlup and Leeson 1980).The question then is whether the rise of printing and new means of communication aect the form and content of science (Eisenstein 1979;Standage 1998).There is aserious possibility that bias AQ1 towards short-term tangible results, often complained about in modern corporate business, mayalso become increasinglyrife in science. Such a foreshortening of the research horizon mayresult in duplicative publications, anomie, and so forth. Third, di ering social and economic structures of science maylead to di erent forms of scienti®c journals, in¯uencing submis- sion and pagecharges (Barton 1963),forms of refereeing (Chubin and Hacket AQ2 1990;Cicchetti 1991),rejection rates (Beyer1978; Hargens 1988),variations AQ3 in joint authorship (Gans 2000),publication delays,and genre formats. Finally,there is anincreasing interest in the potential impacts of electronic publication upon the industry (Day1993) and upon science (Nunberg 1993),as well as in pricing the Internet (MacKie-Mason and 270 Articles
Varian1995). Yet, weremain skeptical asto the size of the impact of these digitaldevelopments. Amini-symposium on the economics of scienti®c publication does not allowus to provide acomprehensive surveyof the events in and literature on the monograph and serials crises, but itdoes enable us to stress the importance of embarking upon amulti-disciplinary evaluationthat starts from acon- textual perspective, looks atdevelopments in sciences other than just eco- nomics, and goes beyond attributing everythingto technological changes. The contributions following this introduction, which werethe products of a workshop on the economics of scienti®c publication, serve to make these points. First, John Mackenzie Owen, aninformation science scholar, care- fully describes the changingcontext in which the dissemination of knowledge takes place,in the hope that economists willprovide theoretical and empirical interpretations of these developments. His paper, `The new dissemination of knowledge’, arguesthat the traditional information chain is no longer valid due to: (1) afocus on the part of publishers on shareholder value;(2) attempts atself-publication bythe academicworld; (3) the loss of functional specializa- tion in the information chain; and (4) initiatives to develop digitallibraries. As aresult, Mackenzie Owen argues,the dissemination of knowledge will transition from physical,printed information resources to networked, digital ones, whilepublishers and libraries willmove from aproduct-orientation to a focus on service. The next paper, `Attention and the art of scienti®c publish- ing’,written byArjo Klamer, acultural studies expert, and Hendrik van Dalen, aneconomic policy advisor, continues the multi-disciplinary focus. It starts with the observation of two harsh facts: (1) there is anin¯ation inthe number of publications; and (2) there is askewed distribution of attention over allpublications. Though these could be understood through the use of a basic market approach or awinner-take-all model, Klamer and VanDalen make aconvincing casefor viewingscience asa network in which the actors’ e orts atcompeting for attention leadto clustering. And this development willonly be stimulated further asa result of digitalization. The contexts outlined in the ®rst two papers receive theoretical treatments in the last two. Robert Parks suggests whyone solution to the serials crisis, namelyfreely availableelectronic journals (FAEJs), is not aviablealternative to the current subscription, site license, or pay-per-view(S/ SL/PPV) model. According to Parks, reasons for changingthe S/SL/PPV model include: (1) readership is limited; and (2) costs areescalating. Yet, the incentives of authors, editors, referees, readers, librarians, university administrators, and publishers serve as obstacles in apossible transition from the S/SL/PPV model to the FAEJone. This iswhatParks labels `The Faustiangrip of academicpublishing’. Henk Plasmeijer, ®nally,has aless dismal viewof waysout of the serials crisis, though using insights from the dismal science. Careful scrutiny of the market for serials, Plasmeijer argues,shows that the problems occur on the demand side of the market, with demand functions being inelastic and rotating Theeconomics of scienti®c publication 271 clockwise, thereby causingprice increases. According to `Pricing the serials library’solutions maybe found in increasing cost awarenesson the part of consumers aswellas providing additional incentives for cost reduction on the part of libraries. Obviously, economists havea role to playin evaluatingscienti® c publica- tion. At the same time, severalconcerns ought to be considered carefully. First, studies limiting themselves to discussions of the incentives of individual scientists, to statistical summaries of the existingsituation, or to the e ects of technologies changes failto capture the complexity of the monograph and serials crises and therefore become useless for policy purposes. At the same time, contextual evaluations must confront the e ects on the content of science. Second, economists cannot narrow their focus to developments within their own discipline if they desire to playa role in shaping the institutions that constitute science asa whole. This ostrich mentality is re¯ected bythe fact that whereas the serials crisis, which has aected economics, has received some attention from economists, the monograph one, which has hit mostly the humanities, has met with little to no interest in our discipline. Not only willeconomists havenothing to sayabout the publication problems aecting science in general,but also willthey need to confront the possible pitfalls of re¯extivity if they ignore other sciences. Third, economists wantingto employ metaphors such asthe marketplace of ideas need to present aconvincing argument for engagingin such analyses.After all,there aremany possible con®gurations of the connections between science and the market. Finally,economists must be careful not to raisethe suspicion that studies of the economics of scienti®c publication arepart of an imperialistic trend that includes economic analysesof health, marriage,the law,and so on. Too much research in many® elds has been done inregards to the publishing phenomenon for economists to be ableto getaway with that. We do not mean to discourage our readers from embarking upon economic studies of scienti®c publication, for wewould not haveedited this mini- symposium if that is how wefelt. The monograph and serials crises have reached such alarmingdepths that aneconomic analysisof these events is urgently needed. As long asthe caveatsoutlined here arecarefully considered, economists ought to be ableto make valuablecontributions to the understanding of scienti®c publication.
Esther-Mirjam Sent andArjo Klamer University ofNotre Dame and ErasmusUniversity, Rotterdam [email protected]/[email protected]
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