Caveat Lector

I promised a while back I would explain the low-level Elsevier slagging I’ve been doing lately. Herewith, my explanation, which shall be biased, curmudgeonly, and generally ticked off. Ye have been warned.

Elsevier makes a lot of its money (not all, but a lot) managing and selling scientific, technical, and medical journals. It owns some of the best in the business. How did it get them? It didn’t build them, oh no. It bought them. Keep that in mind; it’s one piece of their parasitism, taking commercial advantage of the sweat of others while adding little or nothing of their own.

These journals get sold primarily to academic libraries, of course; individual subscriptions are a drop in the bucket of Elsevier’s income compared to what they make off libraries.

Think about that for a moment, please. Who pays for the research that gets into these journals? A prime lot of it is paid for by the public dollar. The public dollar also funds a heck of a lot of academic libraries. So those libraries are spending public dollars on Elsevier to get access to research that the public dollar already paid for.

When the electronic revolution hit serials (and it’s been and gone, people), Elsevier came up with a bright idea: bundle a whole bunch of journals together and sell the bundle to libraries at a cost less than the sum of the individual subscriptions. And a lot of libraries unwisely bought into this Big Deal.

And Elsevier gleefully jacked up prices on the Big Deal, while including contract language that jacked up prices on the important journals for any library leaving the Big Deal. And it did this again. And again. And again.

Kenneth Frazier explains why the Big Deal is a bad idea, but I’ll summarize. One, it takes the librarian out of serials-selection decisions. Libraries end up with a lot of junk journals just so they can get access to the good ones, and by the same token bundled junk journals never die because their circulation numbers don’t drop. Library technology and acquisitions systems are unfairly burdened also; it takes work to keep holdings information up-to-date in a library catalog, work that’s pretty pointless for a junk journal. (What, you think library catalogs happen by magic? You probably think librarians just shelve books, too.)

Two, it puts much too much pricing power in Elsevier’s hands, and Elsevier proved quite conclusively it couldn’t be trusted with that power.

Three, contractual access restrictions on electronic journals lead to ridiculously overwrought denials of access. Librarians have quite a few horror stories on this score; I think Frazier retails a couple.

And all this time, Elsevier was rakin’ in the big bucks from journals. What did they do to earn it? Well, that’s a poser, that is. They didn’t build the journals; they bought them. They don’t write the material; scientists do that for free. They don’t do peer review or selection for the most part; scientists do that for free too. Some of the editing on these puppies is done by scientists (again, for free); the rest Elsevier outsources, along with the rest of production.

So they’re the managers at the top, whatever that turns out to mean in practice (and I’ve never worked directly with or for Elsevier, but I have worked with some Elsevier-like entities, and I was never overly impressed with their management). And they’re lawyers and salesmen. That’s about it. That, to my mind, is pretty goldarn parasitical. They are doing a vanishingly small bit of the actual work for immense shares of the money. And they’re holding all that human knowledge up to ransom to boot, which I just can’t countenance.

That’s why I was dancing about in glee to see UC Santa Cruz and Cornell and NCSU and Harvard and others telling Elsevier where to shove the Big Deal. That’s why I think open-access serials are the best idea to come down the publishing pike in a long time. That’s why I think libraries ought to get their fingers into the open-access management and production pie—it’ll be a cold day in hell before libraries don’t do better at lower cost than Elsevier, and the open-access revenue stream (yes, there is one) will, I believe, prove helpful to post-Internet academic librarianship.