RE: paleonet The threat of the Publishing Crises to Paleontology and to the Commercial

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Concerning the cheer-leading that goes on for society journals and 
online publishing ...
       I don't know the details of the economics of the magazines that 
are the "learned journals", but my friends in the more conventional 
publishing industry tell me that the "cover price" of the magazine 
makes up something like 1/3 of the actual cost of production and 
publishing. The rest of the costs of publication and the profit margin 
come from the sale of advertising space. In the commercial journals 
this comes from two main sources - the sale of equipment and software 
relevant to the discipline(s) covered by the magazine, and secondly 
from the recruitment adverts.
       If you want to make an impact on the policies and prices of the 
commercial journals, then you will have a much faster and greater 
effect if you can address this issue. If you can take some of that 
advertising revenue, then you will hit them in the only organ they care 
about (the wallet); if you can reduce the effectiveness of that 
advertising (e.g. by purchasing from people who don't advertise in the 
commercial journals AND telling the companies involved why you excluded 
them from the tendering process), you'll hit them in the wallet and 
you'll get their attention. Unfortunately, in both cases you're more 
likely to actually push the commercial journals into *raising* their 
cover price than reducing it.
       The area where a "grass roots" campaign is most likely to be 
rapidly effective is by repositioning recruitment advertising. In this 
respect I already see an appreciable amount of job advertising going 
past on the mailing list (ATTN: list manager : does a "Palaeonet-jobs" 
list sound credible?) ; moving some of that advertising onto the 
websites of (for example) Palaeo.Electronica should be comparatively 
easy (does P.E. have the database back-end to handle this sort of 
static, rapidly changing content, and to do the relevant billing ; is 
there a financial billing model?).
       
       How much of the recruitment advertising in e.g. Nature comes 
directly from the departments recruiting, and how much from 
institution-level Human Remains Mangling Offices (sorry, private joke, 
a friend is a Hunam Resources Manageress) who see the large commercial 
journals as a good institutional hedge against allegations of cronyism, 
discrimination etc. Is there a line here where the on-line journals 
could benefit from some targeted advertising? (An article in an on-line 
HRM journal would be particularly apposite.)
       
-- 
 Aidan Karley,
 Aberdeen, Scotland,
 Location: 57°10' N,  02°09'  W (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
 Written at Mon, 18 Apr 2005 08:28 +0100