A Scholarly Monopoly Nightmare

Monday, September 25, 2017

Scholarly publishing is $25 billion industry, according to a 2015 report, including $10 billion in journals, $5 billion in scholarly books.  Large global media companies have a vested interest in keeping income and profit flowing. The key players work in the billions of dollars-- Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer/Nature—all of which rank among the world’s largest publishing houses.  To increase market share in the shrinking of the scholarly marketplace of frozen academic hires and capped of library budgets, they have swallowed up smaller ones as the key strategy. This includes my own former publishing house, Left Coast Press, now owned by Routledge.

How else they’ve chosen to grow is to change products, moving from simple providers of content to include many other academic services. In the past year, Elsevier alone has purchased the preprint service SSRN, the data sharing service Mendeley, and the repository bePress. Each of these organizations was originally launched by groups of scholars as ways to circumvent the traditional commercial publishing infrastructure, of which Elsevier is the most vilified part for its aggressive pricing. Ironically, each of them sold their service to Elsevier for a tidy sum. Elsevier has promised these organizations not to tamper with their existing operation but the founders of these groups have met with accusations of selling out. Their competitors have also begun snapping up groups that provide services to academic researchers, mostly in the sciences.

Why? The answer lies in a strategy over a century old, vertically integrated monopolies.

Standard Oil provides the model the railroads or oil companies of the heyday of industrial capitalism, where oil was prospected, mined, refined, transported, and sold by a single company, each division taking a profit in each step of the process. Its modern counterpart is Amazon. Originally an online retail book seller, and not a profitable one, Amazon created a self-publishing arm, CreateSpace, to whose authors it could promise preferential marketing through the Amazon website. To help these mostly-novice authors produce professional-looking books with attractive covers, Amazon created a production division and sold their services to these authors. Authors who wanted printed copies of their books could use Amazon’s print on demand capabilities. With enormous amounts of data on what sells and what doesn’t, It didn’t take long for them to create their own Amazon Publishing division, looking at their spreadsheets of self-published books and offering the most successful authors to become Amazon’s publishing division authors. They also used their mountains of data to lure successful authors away from traditional publishing houses with promises of preferred marketing on the Amazon website. They locked in customers with promise of quick, free shipping through its AmazonPrime service.  Having caused the demise of most bookstores in communities, Amazon began in 2016 to open its own brick and mortar stores to replace them. One of their initial stores will be in my own home town of Walnut Creek, CA, opening late in 2017 after having running out of town the half dozen traditional bookstores by undercutting their prices. From selecting authors, to production, to printing, to online selling, to bookstores, Amazon has vertically integrated the retail book business in a way the Carnegies and Rockefellers would admire.

Can scholarly communications be  monopolized by one or a few players in a similar fashion? Let’s take the case of a hypothetical large publisher Carnegie Age Publications (“Carnage” for short) and imagine this scenario. Your grant documents are held by a Carnage repository who also provide a service to help you prepare and store the many supporting documents required by grant agencies. Another Carnage division manages the grant for you at a price lower than your university. You upload all of your data to one of Carnage’s data services, something like Mendeley. When you have drafted your paper, you post it on a preprint service hosted by Carnage. Having already registered with one Carnage service, the process is seamless when you decide to submit your article to a Carnage journal. The journal editor has access to the preprint reviews of your work to speed the peer review process. A commercially-owned repository, a copy of Elsevier’s Bepress, becomes the official repository for your paper, as is demanded by your university and grant agency. Another corporate division automatically adds your published paper to your Carnage-run personal repository. The publisher releases the abstract or a press release to a variety of social media and scholarly channels to promote your work. Carnage includes your article as part of a collection of articles on your topic sold as a Carnage book.

Elsevier’s purchases of the past year mean that much of this infrastructure is already in place. Even if you are not compelled to stay within carefully tailored systems that move you seamlessly from one research and publishing service to the next, the process of removing it and taking it elsewhere, whether it is competitor Springer or some non-profit collective of scholars, is more troublesome and time consuming than just pushing a button to move your work to the next step. Much like Amazon, where it’s easier to buy everything-- your summer novels for beach reading, jars of salsa to munch as you read, and new refrigerator to keep the accompanying beer cold-- from a single source than to scour dozens of websites to find the best deal on each, the goal is to be able to provide scholars with all the research activities they need in a single place, locked in by convenience and maybe someday by coercion. The vertical integration of scholarly communication will be complete.

How this monopoly gets monetized is still uncertain. Will you be charged for each step in the process? Will you be obligated to contribute to Carnage’s marketing and social media budget to give your work preferential viewing to those who access any of Carnage’s services, those targets carefully  defined by the extensive data that Carnage has on the tens of thousands of scholars who use their services? Will you be the subject of those tailored ads, paid for by other scholars, publishers, grant agencies, and universities?   Will their increased share of published work allow Carnage to charge your library more to keep their subscriptions? Will Carnage include ads for other products not related to your scholarship, selling you furniture and vacations to Puerto Vallarta while you conduct a search for a Carnage-published article.

This scenario is well on its way to playing out. Is this a dystopia designed to capture and sequester every scrap of your scholarly output behind some global corporate firewall, or is it a scholar’s utopia to seamlessly move your scholarship from fuzzy idea to permanent archive accessible to all? That won’t be known for a long time. After all, most of the millions of regular Amazon customers, including many academics, are content with the service they receive. Nor is it known who the key players will be. While Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley seem to be already on the launching pad, there is no reason why an Amazon, Google, Apple, as an as-yet-unknown party will see the opportunity and step in to create their own  system.

I’ve been asked to write an article that outlines how scholars might be able to resist this monopolistic system. And I’m struggling. But will let you know if I have an answer. In the interim, if you don’t have enough to worry about with North Korea, climate change, and The Wall, here’s something else closer to home to have nightmares about.

 (c) Scholarly Roadside Service

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