Subject: categories: Re: journal boycott

From: Bob Rosebrugh <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 23:42:31 -0300 (ADT)

[Note from moderator: Michael Barr suggested that his contribution to the
Newsletter on Serials Pricing be circulated.]

						ISSN: 1046-3410

		NEWSLETTER ON SERIALS PRICING ISSUES

			NO 229 - July 13, 1999
			 Editor: Marcia Tuttle

				CONTENTS

	     229.1 WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO? Michael Barr

229.1 WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO?
      Michael Barr, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill 
      University, [email-masked]

I have been reading the prices newsletter for a year and a half and 
I would like to make some comments, especially to refute some of 
the more outrageous claims made by publishers.

I believe that I have an unusually broad perspective on the 
publishing business, having witnessed it from several angles. First 
and foremost, I have been an active researcher (in mathematics), 
having been author (or occasionally coauthor) of some 70 articles 
and coauthor of two books, one of which is about to go into its 
third edition. Second, I have been member and chair of the Canadian 
Mathematical Society (CMS) publications committee and have a clear 
idea of what its publishing costs actually are. Third, I am an 
editor or associate editor of two print journals, one published by 
a commercial publisher and one by a university press, as well as 
editor of two electronic journals, both distributed free. Finally, 
my daughter worked for two years around 1990 in the journals 
department of an academic publisher and I have had extensive 
discussions with her about her experiences and those of people she 
knows who are still in the field.

The CMS journals are not the cheapest journals published by a 
society but still beat any commercial journal by a factor of 2 to 
5, according to the figures collected by Ron Kirby. There used to 
be page charges, but only about 30% of the authors paid them and 
they were eventually abandoned as more trouble than they were 
worth. Despite this, the CMS has a clear profit of perhaps 
$100,000/year, and this is a major source of income for the society 
(which has maybe 1000 members). This is real, not paper profit. 
What expenses do we skip by not being commercial? We have some 
typesetting costs but most of the articles now come already set in 
the mathematical typesetting system TeX that has rapidly become the 
standard for mathematical publication. But this is also true for 
the commercial journals. As a result, publishing costs have dropped 
substantially in recent years, although not as much as we were led 
to believe. Incidentally, twenty and thirty years ago, publishers 
claimed that the reason mathematics was so expensive to publish was 
the typesetting costs. Now that most manuscripts come in already 
typeset, they claim that typesetting was a negligible part of the 
cost. We have to pay for copy editing costs, printing, binding, 
mailing, etc. We do little advertising, but advertising is not a 
major item for established journals in any case. Once upon a time 
we got free office space, telephone and mailing privileges and even 
some secretarial services from the university where the editors 
were, but as university budgets have tightened, we have had to 
start paying for these just like any commercial journal. The one 
expense we clearly do not have is a stipend paid the editor-in-
chief. I do not know how much that is, but it cannot be significant 
for a journal that costs $3000 a year and has a subscription base 
of 1000.

So where does all the money go? One answer was supplied by my 
daughter who informs me that her publisher had five levels of 
administrators who had no day-to-day contact with the actual 
publishing, but make decisions increasingly removed from reality 
and draw six or even seven figure salaries. No doubt, the higher 
executives travel first class, or perhaps by corporate jet. By 
contrast, the CMS journals are overseen by a publication committee, 
the executive committee and board of directors of the society and, 
ultimately, the membership, all of whom exercise a very light hand 
and operate gratis. Of course, if societies were to undertake to 
publish dozens of journals, this structure would no longer work. So 
one answer is surely that in academic journal publishing, there are 
few, if any, economies of scale and very serious diseconomies. In 
that case, the fact that publishing is falling into fewer and fewer 
hands is even more disturbing.

The electronic journal I help edit, _Theory and Applications of
Categories_, is free and available to everyone with an internet
connection. We have published only about a dozen papers a year, but 
that's ok; we want to establish a reputation and have it there if 
the other journals fold. I have announced publicly that I will 
neither referee for nor submit papers to high priced commercial 
journals. I quite recently refused to become an editor for a new 
journal that was to have been published by, I think, Birkhaeuser. 
Partly for that reason, the to-be editor decided to make it 
electronic instead. I should add that not all commercial publishers 
are high priced. There are a couple of small publishers that are 
publishing good journals at reasonable prices.

As an author, I am beginning to feel ill-used. I spend the time 
doing the research, writing it up and so on and the journals end up 
owning it. The quid pro quo is forty or fifty "free" reprints? They 
tell us that copyright acts are there to protect intellectual 
property, but they certainly don't protect mine. My interests are 
served by distribution as wide as possible and the publishers' by 
restricting distribution to the few that can still pay for it. For 
the last two papers published in a commercial journal, I altered 
the copyright form to retain the right to post electronically. The 
publisher accepted it, but would they if a large number of authors 
did it? I do know that one colleague of mine got a letter from a 
publisher's lawyer ordering him to remove one of his papers from 
his electronic archive. Actually, it is only in the last 15 or 20 
years that I have been even asked to sign copyright documents; 
perhaps since the 1976 US copyright act. Before that, the issue 
never arose. The CMS journals and the electronic journal I edit ask 
only for a one-time licence.

When you ask what a publisher adds to a publication, there is copy
editing, printing, binding, mailing, subscription servicing and 
maybe a tiny bit of publicity (once the journal is established). I 
think they also add an enormous amount of often useless overhead. 
When published electronically, only the copy-editing remains. Since 
our journal is published free, this is not done in any systematic 
way. It is left to the author and I, on one occasion, returned a 
paper to the author for serious TeX deficiencies. He had to hire 
someone to repair it since he refused to learn enough TeX to do it 
himself. That is unfortunate and I sympathize with him, but think 
of it as a form of page charge. As an editor, I do for free exactly 
what I do for the other two journals for free. The editor-in-chief 
(actually called managing editor) of the electronic journal does 
more. He spends 3-6 hours on each paper and, so long as we have 
only a dozen a year, he does not mind. But he and the other editors 
are aware that there is a serious problem brewing here and we do 
not know what to do about it. The obvious thing would be for the 
universities to take some part of their serials budget and simply 
subsidize these activities that have the potential of enormous 
savings in the long run. But how do you get there from here?

Although this would sap the library's budget, it should not result 
in loss of jobs in the library since exactly the same (or more) 
tasks of storage, archival and retrieval would exist. It would only 
sap the journal acquisitions budget. But what I don't see is how 
the universities could be made to share these costs in an equitable 
fashion. Some would subsidize these electronic journals and others 
would be tempted to sponge off those. This is a problem, but not I 
think an insuperable one.

Why do we publish in journals at all?  In fact, all my papers in 
the last ten years have been distributed electronically and are old 
hat by the time they are published. We all know the answer. For 
promotions and tenure (no longer an issue for me) and research 
grants (I still have a good one and would like to keep it). Thus 
the only real problem is that of certification. And acceptance of 
electronic publication is growing. Note that we did not name our 
journal "Electronic journal .." We decided it would be like naming 
it "The A4 journal of.." In the end, I think there will be good and 
poor electronic journals just as there are good and poor print 
journals. For the time being, however, I am not recommending 
electronic publication for young researchers.

A recent writer to this newsletter made the fatuous suggestion that 
free electronic journals might be violating the anti-trust laws. An 
elephant cannot sue a mouse for anti-trust violations. The anti-
trust laws are not there to guarantee a business success; they are 
there to protect consumers from price gouging by a monopolist. If 
an airline is sued over low prices, it is not the low prices that 
are the ultimate problem but the likelihood that, once the 
competitor is driven out of the market, the price will be raised to 
a much higher level. The history of People's Air shows that this is 
not just a theory. Much as I would like to see some of the 
commercial publishers driven out of business, I know this is not 
likely to happen. Even if did, the publishers of electronic 
journals could not raise prices the way paper journals have since 
the barriers to starting new ones are so low.

Since anti-trust was mentioned, it is a wonder to me that some 
state attorneys-general haven't decided that the journals are 
running a monopolistic business and are engaged in price gouging. 
After all, a significant part of the state universities' budgets 
are going to these publishers. The fact that, as recently pointed 
out in these pages, a few private universities can still afford 
these journals is irrelevant.

But let us engage in some speculation by supposing that it is 
illegal to do work gratis. Then the most guilty are the researchers 
who do the work in the first place and give it away to the 
publishers. Perhaps the publishers ought to be required to pay 
serious money for the rights to publish. It was one thing when the 
major journals were non-profit and were performing a service to the 
profession just by existing. But now it is a big business; why 
should they not pay for their raw materials. Then there is the free 
editorial work. I believe the editors-in-chief do get a significant 
"honorarium." But the remaining editors do not usually get so much 
as a postage stamp. At least, I never have. The authors and editors 
at least get some recognition for their work. What about the 
anonymous referees? Honest refereeing is hard work and there is no 
payoff, either in money or honor. Yet without it the whole system 
would come crashing down. It was done free for the good of the 
profession in the old days, since the journals themselves were non-
profit. When commercial journals came along (which started, at 
least in a big way, in the 1960s), we just went along with free 
refereeing since, it was what we were accustomed to. What would 
have happened if the referees had insisted on being paid? I, for 
one, have just made a personal decision to do no more unpaid 
refereeing for commercially published journals. No decision I have 
ever made in my professional career has been less painful. If more 
of us adopted such a policy, the whole enterprise would collapse. 
Moreover, it would cost us individually nothing since only the 
editors would know. As an editor, I will still ask people to 
referee papers, but if they all refuse, the journal will disappear.

One new feature on the publishing scene is that several of the old 
line journals that used to be published by mathematical societies, 
especially in Europe, have been taken over by commercial houses. I 
assume that the societies sell them for a tidy sum. The price 
usually stays low for a few years and then starts rising often to 
stratospheric heights. My department is likely to stop subscribing 
to the oldest mathematical journal in the world, of which we have a 
complete set. It will be a painful decision, but the journal is 
very expensive and no longer of much importance.

I have not mentioned the actual disparity of costs. I recently
calculated the cost per page, for each of the nearly one hundred
journals we had a paid subscription to in 1996 (we also have a
substantial number of exchange subscriptions, all non-commercial).  
I realize that this is a crude measure, since not all pages are the 
same size. But at least it is better than just looking at 
subscription cost. The costs per page ranged from $.04 to $4.86. If 
you remove the top and bottom ten, the range is $.18 to $1.37, a 
factor of over 7. The journal at $.18 happens to be on anybody's 
list of the top 5 mathematics journals in the world. So does the 
eighth most expensive, which costs $1.51. There is no correlation 
between price and quality. There was one commercial journal at $.38 
and one society published journal at $.75 and they were the 
respective extremes. But every journal that cost more than $.75 (a 
couple of Russian translations excepted) was commercially published 
and everyone below $.38 was published by a society or a university. 
The figures show that some of the top journals in the world are 
among the cheapest. Unfortunately, a couple of the top journals are 
among the most expensive and this will be our most difficult 
decision as we have to cut about 10% from our budget, while prices 
are estimated to rise 13% besides (part of that due to exchange 
rate fluctuations).

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