Are we really surprised? How would you feel if some of your customers demanded you turn your business over to them for zero compensation?
I wish the linguists all the luck in the world starting their new, open-access journal.
Probably the same way encyclopedia companies felt as wikipedia grew. Bad news for them.
The journals provide a service, but Elsevier is a rent-seeking entity, it buys up/takes over publications and hikes up prices.
http://imechanica.org/node/1531#comment-3251 estimates that the International Journal of Solids and Structures cost about $0.5m/year to run and had revenues of about $3.5m, or a net profit of $3m going to Elsevier for owning the journal and little else.
And that's exactly what you see happening here. The linguists are saying that they'll be able to provide the product for a lesser price, but being nice and offering to let Elsevier continue to compete. If Elsevier refuses, and the linguists go ahead and start their own journal, then the free market has triumphed.
What's happening with #icanhazpdf is that researchers are innovating to find ways to provide the product (access to research papers) at a much lower cost than Elsevier provides it — free, in fact. However, Elsevier, rather than compete with them, seeks to enforce government-granted monopolies on providing this service, known as copyrights, in order to protect their profits, at the cost of providing benefits to society.
High prestige journals offer value to both authors and readers. Apparently both authors and readers feel it's worth the money.
And again, there is nothing stopping anyone else from starting their own journal. If they fail, then authors and readers must find some value in the current situation.
This is a very odd situation that I suspect isn't really amenable to normal economic analysis, at least outside of very simplistic models.
The value that journals offer is, over the medium term, due to the editorial staff and the authors that submit articles. Remove those two, and the journal will cease to be "high prestige" and will likely fold. In the short term, however, the value is in the journal's name: you could replace the editors of Lancet with a crop of corn husks and it would still be "high prestige" for quite a while---at least until the third or fourth major screw-up. (Losing the authors is harder, but hold that thought for another paragraph.)
On the other hand, over the long term, the value lies entirely in the readers. No major academic is going to waste their professional capital on a journal that isn't read by their colleagues, and ultimately, an academic's articles need to be read, not just published, for them to advance more than locally.
In the same way, new journals have issues: In the short term, it's hard to get over the name recognition hump; in the medium term, they have to have consistently good editors and authors to attract more than momentary attention. But once they have attracted a readership, they have an inertia that makes other factors less important.
A couple of examples:
* Anyone heard from Software: Practice and Experience lately? It was one of my favorite journals, and was being edited by Douglas Comer the last time I interacted with it. But I haven't seen an issue in more than a decade, mostly because it is (was?) hideously expensive, and haven't seen any references to it, either.
* How about PLOS? Seems to be high prestige now, judging by the number of references I hear on the Science and Nature podcasts.
My personal suspicion is that a better analogy for Elsevier and company is the mining business: extracting as much wealth as possible from academic journals, as cheaply as possible, before the ore runs out and the town dries up and blows away.
> And again, there is nothing stopping anyone else from starting their own journal. If they fail, then authors and readers must find some value in the current situation.
Publishing in a journal with a low impact factor isn't nearly as worthwhile as publishing in one with a higher impact factor, which implies a strong lock-in effect which works on Elsevier's favor. Even if Elsevier weren't around, a new journal would have a hard time getting off the ground.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Graphics_Tools
[1] http://casual-effects.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-journal-of-co...
[2] http://jcgt.org/
> We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.
> Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.
Now it looks like Elsevier is not going to cooperate, so there's hoping that linguists will now show solidarity and refuse to take on editorial roles with Elsevier [2]. The Association of Dutch Universities is also negotiating open access conditions with various publishers. Interesting times!
[0] https://www.facebook.com/johan.rooryck/posts/773059302822316
[1] http://www.lingoa.eu/about/aims/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/marc.vanoostendorp/posts/1020623886...