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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 94 - 99)

MONDAY 8 MARCH 2004

DR JULIA KING, MRS SALLY MORRIS AND MR MARTIN RICHARDSON

  Q94  Chairman: Good afternoon, may I thank you for being patient? We shall have to get an even bigger room next time if it goes on like this; we will have to get the Albert Hall or we might take over the chamber as there are more of us than them. As you know, the public and professional groups have really been interested in this inquiry; it has generated a lot of interest and a lot of documentation and this packed session is indicative of that. Many people phone us up and tell us not to believe everything we hear. May I, on behalf of the Committee, say that we are not actually naïve, we do meet a lot of people, we are used to finding out a lot of facts and we have a reputation on this Committee to keep up which is not perhaps the most favourite committee in the world with many professional groups outside but you can trust us to hear, listen and judge later on. Please do not bother to phone us, we will phone you; we understand the problems. Thank you very much, Martin, Julia and Sally, for coming along to help us with the inquiry. I hope you heard some of the stuff which was there last week and we will give you opportunities to reply to some of that of course. The first quick question is about smaller publishers and the role they play in the STM market. What do they have to offer that is not available elsewhere?

  Mrs Morris: A great many of the smaller publishers are non-profit publishers, typically the society publisher only has a handful of journals and even the university presses have relatively few journals compared with large publishers. A great many of the small publishers, though by no means all, are non-profit, which adds an extra feature to what they bring to the picture. In general, small publishers bring flexibility, ability to give personal attention to the authors and editors they work with. Very often they bring very reasonable prices too, whether they are commercial or not.

  Dr King: I would like to support what Sally said. We get a very good engagement with the community and particularly publishers who have a very focused community, as many of the learned society ones do. We know our community well and we take great pride in trying to ensure we can deliver the sorts of things they are interested in.

  Mr Richardson: I would agree with that. As part of the academic community, as a university press, as part of a university, we feel we are very close to the academic community and can reflect their needs in our publishing.

  Q95  Chairman: That is all very nice; you have all agreed on something. Let us see whether we can split you apart now. Sally, in your experience, do many societies choose to have their journals published by a commercial publisher? What effect do you think such decisions have on the price/availability of those journals?

  Mrs Morris: Quite a lot do. Estimates vary, but perhaps half as many again as do their own publishing are published by other publishers on their behalf, not necessarily commercial publishers, some of them turn to other non-profit publishers, for instance Martin publishes on behalf of a number of societies. That is one way in which a small society publisher can gain the benefits of critical mass. If you are very, very small, it is quite difficult to compete, particularly in an environment of big deals. If the smaller publishers want to compete in that environment, one option is to work with a larger publisher. Another is to work together in a group of smaller publishers. In many cases societies which are published by other publishers do retain quite a lot of control. They normally retain complete control over editorial policy and very often considerable control over other aspects of publishing policy, including pricing. You will quite often find that society journals operate under different licensing or pricing rules from other journals in a publisher's stable because the owners, the societies, have insisted on particular terms.

  Q96  Chairman: Let me ask all of you now: how do you view the behaviour and pricing policies of the large commercial publishers? What impact do their policies have on you? Do you differentiate yourselves from the pricing policies of the market leaders?

  Dr King: Yes, we do. In a way we have to say that it is something of an advantage to us because we have a certain sympathy from the academic community because we are not Elsevier and we are not as pushy, we do not hike our prices up as much.

  Q97  Chairman: What does "pushy" mean?

  Dr King: As commercial, as acutely commercial. We do not push the big deals on librarians and we have our own packages, but they are smaller than theirs.

  Q98  Chairman: You say you think they do.

  Dr King: That is what we hear from talking to the communities.

  Q99  Chairman: You could not possibly confirm that.

  Dr King: That is what we hear.

  Mr Richardson: On average we have lower prices than most of our commercial competitors. It is partly because we are doing a very high proportion of society publishing and the print runs and distribution of those journals tend to be much larger and partly that we operate on a lower profit margin than many commercial publishers.

  Mrs Morris: There have been quite a lot of published studies comparing the prices of commercial and non-commercial publishers in different subject areas and they all seem to show that on average non-commercial publishers have lower prices. It is not to say there are not some very reasonably priced commercial publishers and vice-versa, but the averages certainly point that way.


 
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