by P.D. Lesko

I WANT TO have lunch with Manfredi La Manna. Anyone who can price a journal subscription at $700 and come out looking like the guy in the white hat is someone I'd love to meet. That's right, Dr. La Manna, founder of the Electronic Society for Social Scientists (ELSSS), was recently quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education as saying that his economics journal, the Review of Banking & Finance, would be priced at $700 per year. A similar journal, the Journal of Monetary Economics, published by a competing company, costs an institution $1,154. At $700 per year, Dr. La Manna's publication would appear to be a bargain.

I also feel compelled to mention that Dr. La Manna intends to pay contributors $500 per piece and pay article referees as well. What we have here, on the surface, are the trappings of an academic journal publishing coup d'etat. Granted, Dr. La Manna's pay rates may be a bit anemic in the face of a $700 subscription price. However, the discipline of economics is awash in professional refereed journals that pay contributors and article referees nothing. How is Dr. La Manna able to produce a quality journal at half the price of his competitor? Put simply, he is cutting profit margins and hoping that his business model (i.e. cheaper subscription prices and compensation for contributors and referees) will attract institutional subscribers, contributors and referees.

Dr. La Manna founded the ELSSS six months after a group of campus administrators, publishers, librarians and association leaders banded together and released a set of principles regarding the production and pricing of scholarly journals: the "guide [to] the transformation of the scholarly publishing system." The principles were formulated and released in the form of a public announcement in response to sharp increases in both the cost and in the sheer volume of academic journals.

The cry has gone out: journal publishers are gouging college libraries and departments, and something must be done. Enter Manfredi La Manna and his $700 subscription. Only in higher education could a $700 subscription be touted as a bargain. All right, maybe an idea like this might also find a warm and ready reception over at the Pentagon, where no one bats an eyelash at bills for $5,000 bolts.

Let's stop for a moment and put this all into perspective. College officials, who have raised the cost of tuition above and beyond the cost of living for the past decade, feel the need to band together to fight the publishing companies who sell journal subscriptions priced in the $1,000-$2,000 range. I surely hope no one at Landmark College was among the band of officials who penned the "guide [to] the transformation of the scholarly publishing system." Tuition at Landmark College has risen 16 percent during the last three years. This year, students are paying $30,700 to attend the institution. At Sarah Lawrence College, students are paying $26,668 for tuition, 11 percent more than three years ago. At $15,782 per year, the cost of tuition at Notre Dame looks a lot like a journal published by Dr. La Manna.

The sheer lunacy of the debate leaves me staggered. College officials at institutions all over the country sell access to their courses, faculty and institutions at whatever cost the higher education market will bear. Why shouldn't academic journal publishers have the right to do the same thing? One could argue, I suppose, that the cost of providing faculty access to these high-priced subscriptions is part of what is driving up the cost of tuition. However, even if the library at Landmark College subscribed to 1,000 journals at $1,500 each, the tuition from 49 students to would cover the expense.

What about the local community college, where tuition is a fraction of what the Landmark College or Notre Dame student pays each year? How is that library supposed to afford $1,000 subscriptions? Employing large numbers of temporary faculty and paying low per-course wages without offering benefits is one way I can think of to cover the cost of such journals. Then again, how many full-time community college faculty teaching five courses every semester have to worry about publishing, research and needing access to the Journal of Monetary Economics at a subscription rate of $1,154 per year?

Four-year private and research institutions require faculty to publish in refereed journals as a part of the tenure process. If, tomorrow, college officials did away with the requirement of article publishing as a barometer of the employability of junior faculty members, the influence of the academic journal would surely decline, as would subscription prices. Publish or perish has given rise to the $2,000 journal subscription price, as well as to the Manfredi La Manna $700 Blue Light Special. Perhaps journal publishers are greedy, but in higher education, product cost and perceived value went their separate ways long, long ago. This, of course, is the secret of Manfredi La Manna's success and the reason why I believe he will go far in academic publishing.