Tim Worstall

Give Us More Tax Money.

Just a small reminder that big business is just as bad as the public sector unions and the chatterati at sticking its nose into the trough of public money:

The state of
university funding in the UK is "unacceptable" and the government must
act to preserve the global reputation of British academic institutions,
the chief executive of media group Reed Elsevier said yesterday.
The
comments from Sir Crispin Davis came as the Anglo-Dutch publisher of
the Lancet and Variety predicted a uniformly strong performance across
its four divisions in 2005.

Well, OK Sir Crispin, this is obviously a well intentioned plea for a better system from one who knows it, yes?

University libraries
are important Reed clients and take out subscriptions to scientific and
medical journals published by the group.
Funding
problems put pressure on library budgets and have an indirect effect on
the group by threatening the amount and quality of publishable research
produced by universities.

Ahh, no, it isn’t. The Government should spend more money on universities so that they wll buy more subscriptions to our products, generate more papers for us to sell to others. Can anyone say "public cost, private profit"?

Now I don’t claim to be an expert on academia, that’s sub-contracted out by this blog to the Bunny,  but what with this interweb thingie, why do we in fact have paid for subscriptions at all? All of the refereeing and peer review is done for free, OK, there’s a need for a few paid editors, but I just can’t see that the system needs to be supported by 400 squid subscriptions to each and every one of tens of thousands of magazines paid for out of public funds.

In

3 responses

  1. Scott at Blithering Bunny Avatar
    Scott at Blithering Bunny

    The internet thingy means that increasingly, library subscriptions are internet-based. But that doesn’t mean a saving in cost, because these subscriptions are usually as much and often more than the print subscriptions! (But I like them, though, because you can print out a paper without getting out of your chair).
    But rest assured that there is enormous pressure on Uni libraries to cut subscriptions, and over the past decades subscriptions to crap journals – and quite a few good ones, unfortunately – have been slashed. I don’t think there’s much waste here – I don’t think things would be that different if Unis were all private.
    Those journals run by Unis find that their subscriptions barely cover the cost of running even a small budget operation, and the privately-owned run-for-profit journals, with a few exceptions (like Nature, I suspect) aren’t really rolling in it.
    Perhaps this is special pleading, but I don’t think the public is ripped off in the case of journal subscriptions, though of course your point about Crispin Davis is exactly right.

    Reply
  2. Jon Barnard Avatar
    Jon Barnard

    Reed Elsevier’s journals certainly are rolling in it – they had operating profit margins of 34% in 2003.

    Reply
  3. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    The academic publisher Pergamon Press, you may recall, was the property of the great socialist M.P., Capn Maxwell. Bob, bob, bob.

    Reply

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