Re: IP law and society (was "protecting inventions")

On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Dan Agin <specpress[_at_]earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> On 19 Jun 97, Harold Federow <hfederow[_at_]u.washington.edu> wrote:
> >
> > However, journals cost a lot partly because they have a restricted
> > audience to spread out printing and other costs over. This gets
> > worse when you look at the increasing number of journals, so that
> > each journal cuts a bit into the audience for related other ones,
> > but the overhead doesn't go down. Therefore, the price goes up and
> > you get a rather vicious circle going. And, this would be true
> > regardless of the copyright assignment policies.
>
> This is not true. Until the 1960s, almost all journals were published
> by scientific societies and they were cheap indeed. Then Robert
> Maxwell of Pergamon realized the libraries were a captive market, and
> he bought up scientific journals left and right, started others, and
> began the wave of scientific journals published by commercial
> interests. Elsevier soon followed. They and others systematically
> raised prices, and today there are journals whose price to libraries
> is $500 per year that at one time cost $50 per year. It's an
> excellent illustration of how greed and IP law have affected the
> distribution of the scientific literature.

Well, I just called to check on the subscription to Physical Review A through E. The US price is $8,720 and it is published by the American Physical Society, not one of the "private" publishers.

ANother thing you neglect to factor in is inflation. I did a "back of the envelope" estimate of inflation (10%/yr 70's, 5%/yr 80's, 3%/yr 90's) and came up with about 5.2 as a deflator. So, your $50 1970 journal would cost $260 now with no price increases other than inflation, at least if the price were constant in real dollars.

This is not to downplay the fact that the private publishers have really jumped into the area and have probably inflated prices more than need be.

Incidentally, if Science Week is the one I think it is, I used to love it as a kid.

Harold Federow
<hfederow[_at_]u.washington.edu> Received on Tue Jun 24 1997 - 16:19:54 GMT