> > > My name is [identity deleted], I am a graduate student in [] at []. My > > professor [], recommended you when I discussed writing an essay on the > > internet and the monopoloy of the journals. I think he was amused when > > I said I wanted to take a marxist approach... Not so sure about that anymore. > > It is not that journals have a monopoly (there are 24,000 different > peer-reviewed journals, publishing about 2.5 million articles per > year), although 1500 of them are published by one publisher. What > the top journals have is *inelastic demand.* (The university libraries > *must* subscribe to them, because their researchers need access.) So > the problem is not monopoly but access; nor is it a marxist matter: > http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#14.Capitalism >
I think one of the main problems is that journals are not monopolies. The problem is not that any one publisher has control over the market, but rather that any non-open access publisher has a monopoly on the distribution of every article that they publish. Journal articles are not interchangeable, and thus it is important to view the distribution of every article as a market of its own. When the right to distribute any article or collection of articles (no matter how small a fraction of the total industry) is monopolized, all of the problems of monopolies follow - especially excessive prices, poor customer service, etc... That these monopolies also have a captive market that requires their products only makes things worse.