What follows is a short snippet from the interior of my paper-in-progress, "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scholarly Journal Publishing." Comments are welcome and can be added below. Alternatively, you can email feedback to me at: striphas@indiana.edu. Thanks in advance for your input!
(For a complete draft of "Acknowledged Goods," please click here.)
Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and
the Politics of Scholarly Journal Publishing
by Ted Striphas
©2008
…Tables one and two survey the prices and publishers of leading journals in the field. Here’s the good news: the cost of an institutional subscription to even the most expensive cultural studies journals, Continuum (US$910/year, or US$227.50/issue) and Media, Culture, and Society (US$1366/year, or US$227.67/issue) doesn’t come close to the most notoriously priced scholarly publication I know of. The Journal of Applied Polymer Science, which is published twice-monthly by Wiley-Blackwell, in 2008 cost institutions US$19,935, or US$830.63/issue.1 The bad news is that, as with the rest of the journal publishing industry, subscription costs tend to increase relative to the size of the journal publisher. The average price of an institutional subscription to one of Taylor & Francis’ cultural studies periodicals, for instance, is more than three-and-a-half times that of Duke University Press—publisher of the least expensive cultural studies journals by far. In the case of Sage Publications, institutional subscribers can expect to pay five times more on average than they would for a Duke title. The gap closes somewhat when one compares New Left Review, which is an independent, “one-off” journal, to Taylor & Francis and Sage, with whom an institutional subscription costs on average one-and-a-half and two times more, respectively. Lawrence & Wishart, publisher of New Formations and Soundings, falls somewhere in between Duke and New Left Review in terms of journal pricing.
At least four conclusions may be drawn from this data. First, journals published by Taylor & Francis and Sage, who own the lion’s share of cultural studies titles, cost between 50% and 500% more than those at the bottom end of the pricing scale. There is a striking imbalance in the price of cultural studies knowledge goods (i.e., journals and journal articles), which in turn begs some obvious yet rarely asked questions: is their cost commensurate with their value? Is an article published in, say, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, really worth four times more than one appearing in Social Text? Is New Left Review only half as good as Cultural Studies←→Critical Methodologies? And so on. Second, the price imbalance cannot be attributed solely to corporate ownership, since Sage is a privately owned, and therefore independent, press. Third, and relatedly, “independent” can mean quite different things, depending on a firm’s size and its total number of assets. Finally, as McCabe notes, the size of a press’ journal portfolio is probably the most consequential factor when it comes to determining journal prices.2 Larger portfolios generally correlate with higher priced journals, and vice-versa. The only possible exception here would be New Left Review, whose moderately high cost is most likely attributable to its “one-off” status….
I wonder why, compared to the rest of Taylor & Francis' journals, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies is relatively inexpensive.
I would imagine that the cost is lower because CCCS is a National Communication Association journal rather than one T&F owns outright. I haven't confirmed that directly and will need to. Thanks for the comment!
Thank you for this brief abstract. We can add fifth conclusion after research about this topic : As usuall Is imbalance at price of journal correlate with intellectual and non-pragmatic effect of higher price journal?(Without any dialogue and intellectual action with ordinary people, They are only critical or non-critical report about current situation of society and …) Or this non-pragmatic effect is main problem of all of journal publishing industry? I don't know. at end It's not my mean that intellectual and non-pragmatic consciousness(after reading article) is luxury and meaningless but I think this is not all of that we can expect from human knowledge especially cultural studies and especially at academic domain.
Thanks regard
Mani,
Certainly journal prices are high, in part, because the vast majority of them maintains a very limited readership. And so the point you raise is an interesting one: if we made our research more accessible, would a broader audience be willing to buy (or otherwise engage with) it? And would the journals then be cheaper and more accessible? I'll have to ponder those issues some more, but I like where they're taking me. I may well revisit them in the conclusion to the paper, which will show up here eventually. For now, thanks very much for your comment!
I'm curious, Ted, about how publishers try to produce value for their journals for institutional subscribers. I'm guessing this is something you've been looking into, but how do they advertise or otherwise promote themselves to institutions? How do they try to distinguish the value of their journals from those of other publishers? Do they ever use cost as a marketing tool? For instance, would Duke say, "We're Duke, we're prestigious [measured, I guess, in terms of breadth of readership, prestige of authors, and citations-are there other ways prestige is measured?], and we're cheaper than those Sage journals."
One other question: I don't know much about how these various presses operate-can Duke afford to price its journals lower (and thus make their appeal to institutional subscribers higher) because of its institutional affiliation, whereas Sage, as a private company, might have to make prices higher in order to guarantee its profits? Or is the Duke press fully unsubsidized by the university?
Hello, Anon., and thank you for commenting. My apologies for the lag in replying to you. Your note arrived while I was out of town, and then I had to proof my copy-edited book ms. Thank you for your patience.
My impression from having looked both formally and informally at years of journal advertising is this: rarely do different publishers' journals compete explicitly with one another (in the humanities, anyway). Most seem to stress impact factors, rankings within a particular discipline or subject, and other such quantitative measures. And to my knowledge, I've never seen price stressed as a selling point (perhaps because so many journals are published by expensive presses). However, some publishers do emphasize their brand names (i.e., what used to be called their imprimaturs) when advertising their various journal products. But here name recognition seems to me more the issue than the press' prestige per se.
As to the second point you raise, I do not really know how the accounting works, exactly. My understanding is that, while most university presses have seen subventions from their home institutions dry up substantially in recent years, many still receive at least some subsidy. So, yes, this would in principle help keep the price of their journals lower. And indeed, private, for-profit publishers must inflate prices to guarantee profits. The only question I have here, though, is this: To what extent do they need to do that? In the full version of "Acknowledged Goods," which I hope to post here on the D&R Wiki one of these days, I talk about how companies like Taylor & Francis/Informa and Wiley-Blackwell are billion-dollar enterprises. Something tells me they could cut their journal prices were they so inclined.
Thanks again for your comments and questions!