Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [86]
The reactions of traditional pay-for-access scientific publishers to open access have varied. Some have begun their own experiments with open access. But many, including some of the largest publishers, feel threatened by the open access movement. For them, open access archives and journals aren’t run-of-the-mill business competitors. Instead, they have the potential to radically change the business model of scientific publishing. Traditional publishers face a tough choice. Should they adopt the open access model of PLoS and journals like it? Or should they stay as they are? Should they go even further, and fight against open access, for instance by lobbying against policies such as the NIH open access policy? It’s a difficult choice to make, for if they go the open access route, it’s possible that it will greatly reduce journal revenues. Unless those companies develop new sources of revenue, their employees will lose jobs, and shareholders will lose money. That’s tough to face after decades and sometimes centuries of hard work building businesses that have served society well. But society’s best interest has shifted away from that old business model. It’s no wonder many traditional publishers feel threatened. The available technology may have changed, but that doesn’t mean the business models have.
Monetarily, there’s a lot at stake here: scientific publishing is a big business. This may be a surprise to you. Certainly, when it comes to high-flying professions, not many people think of scientific journal publishing. CEOs from scientific publishers don’t often appear on the cover of Forbes or Business Week, alongside software moguls or hedge fund operators. But maybe they should, because scientific publishing is staggeringly profitable. The world’s larges scientific journal publisher is the company Elsevier. In 2009 Elsevier made a profit of 1,100 million US dollars, more than a third of their total revenue of 3,200 million dollars. As a share of revenue, that’s the kind of profit enjoyed by businesses such as Google, Microsoft, and a very few others. Elsevier is so profitable that its parent company, the Reed Elsevier Group, recently sold off another big part of their business, the educational publisher Harcourt, for close to five billion dollars, to help finance the expansion of Elsevier’s journal publishing business. And while Elsevier is the biggest of the scientific publishers, many other scientific publishers also do amazingly well. Even some not-for-profit scientific societies make a lot of money by publishing journals for their members, with the profits then subsidizing other society activities. For example, in 2004 the American Chemical Society made a profit of about 40 million US dollars on their journals and online databases, out of revenue of 340 million dollars. That’s much less than Elsevier, but remember: this is a not-for-profit society!
With so much at stake, it’s no surprise that some traditional scientific journal publishers have begun aggressively lobbying against open access. According to a report published by Nature in 2007, a major publishers’ trade association hired high-priced public relations consultant Eric Dezenhall to help them take on the open access movement. Dezenhall had earned a reputation as the “pit bull” of the public relations world, with clients including Jeffrey Skilling, the disgraced former Enron chief, and ExxonMobil, which hired Dezenhall’s company to help them take on Greenpeace. Dezenhall advised the publishers to focus on simple messages such as “Public access