On 27-Jan-07, at 3:24 PM, Donat Agosti wrote:
Within the OECD, the organization of the industrialized countries,
they list in their Outlook 2006 for 2005 USD770billion spent on
research, of which USD265Billion is from the public sector. This is
clearly not peanuts, and dwarfs whatever the publishers contribute to
disseminate this knowledge generated.
What do publishers contribute to disseminate knowledge?
An important service, of course.
A financial contribution? Not really, except in the case of
publishers who choose to subsidize their publications (as some
associations do), and publishers which are losing money.
Otherwise, the financial underpinnings of scholarly publishing comes
from researchers and their universities and funders, whether directly
through support for the research, or indirectly through library
subscriptions.
It is misleading for publishers to represent themselves as major
financial contributors to scholarly publishing, with the exceptions
noted above. Those who fit this category can claim to be supporting
scholarly publishing, but cannot make this claim for profitable
publishers.
Heather Morrison
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
Received on Mon Jan 29 2007 - 04:06:16 GMT