The $700 Blue Light Special
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.
