Re:We've failed: open access is winning and we must change o...
by gcr on Saturday September 16, 2017 @09:37PM
(#15267773)
Reputation is built with journals, not publishers.
Publishers _do_ add value to _conferences_ by helping out with funding. Since most smaller interesting conferences aren't at all profitable, it's a "symbiotic" relationship between the conference and the publisher: the publisher effectively runs the conference in return for having exclusive distribution rights over the proceedings. Sucks for the profs and students though.
When a conference gets big enough to raise their own funding _and_ bold enough to shirk their publisher's exclusivity contract, in-house distribution begins to make sense.
What they really offer is filtering; being published in a particular journal is a signal of quality and impact of the work. The production and even distribution pieces are incidental to the value, but filtering is difficult to monetize in a normal market because it has high fixed and zero marginal cost. (The same is largely true of production, and as noted distribution is near zero marginal cost as well.)
Note that this doesn't mean there is no value add: you can have value without marginal cost, such that utility would be lost to customers if you stopped paying the fixed costs. OTOH, if the value produced by the fixed costs has no cost to scale and no practical barrier to people reproducing it once you've produced it, you can't monetize the value produced.