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The Ticker: Academic Journals Lead the Way in Profits

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Academic Journals Lead the Way in Profits

By  Lawrence Biemiller
December 23, 2014

Did you know that Elsevier, the big scholarly-journal publisher, has a more lucrative business than Apple’s? That’s among the points made in a Green Mountain College professor’s striking look at the highly profitable academic-publishing business.

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Did you know that Elsevier, the big scholarly-journal publisher, has a more lucrative business than Apple’s? That’s among the points made in a Green Mountain College professor’s striking look at the highly profitable academic-publishing business. The professor—Jason Schmitt, director of the college’s communications-studies program—calls scholarly journals “the most profitable obsolete technology in history.”

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  • Source: Huffingtonpost

“A large research university will pay between $3- to $3.5-million a year in academic subscription fees—the majority of which goes to for-profit academic publishers,” says Sam Gershman, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT who assumes his post as an assistant professor at Harvard next year. In contrast to the exorbitant prices for access, the majority of academic journals are produced, reviewed, and edited on a volunteer basis by academics who take part in the tasks for tenure and promotion.

“Even the Harvard University Library, which is the richest university library in the world, sent out a letter to the faculty saying that they can no longer afford to pay for all the journal subscriptions,” says Gershman.

Read more at: www.huffingtonpost.com

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Lawrence Biemiller
Lawrence Biemiller was a senior writer who began working at The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1980. He wrote about campus architecture, the arts, and small colleges, among many other topics.
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