A True Market Failure
Richard Poynder,
Information Today,
Dec 10, 2002
Good interview with Mark McCabe (an economist in the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) Antitrust Division for 7 years and now an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology) on the "market failure" evident in the academic journal publishing industry, a failure that will be deepened, not alleviated, with current online publishing models. "s we make the transition to an all-digital environment, users are increasingly being offered not individual print titles but large bundles of electronic titles in the shape of digital portfolios like Elsevier's ScienceDirect... The publishers get that information for free and then rely on scholars to provide refereeing services, essentially for free. In the digital environment, the only thing publishers need to provide is the infrastructure for providing the material online, a few account managers, and advertising. They make a relatively small investment and then (rationally) charge a high price for the end product."
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