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Comment by Pannoniae | Hacker News Reader

Do I understand this correctly? Since universities pay through their nose for journal and publisher subscriptions, they don't have money to actually publish books themselves. Is that right?

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Yes, and it's a death spiral since the university presses could, in theory, provide some competition. Can't/Won't invest in alternatives => lower competition for the parasites => higher subscription costs => less resources to invest in alternatives.

Academic libraries and publishing are effectively being privatized and will be dominated by ever more rent-seeking. I don't see this getting turned around unless universities dictate to their faculty where they can publish, i.e. stop subsidizing their competition.

I don't think the major universities - the ones that could have publishing houses that matter - are too broke to be able to keep the publishing house running.

So wait, if that's true, is the article at hand here mistaken, or in bad faith?

Also, isn't the case that it is mostly the "major" universities that have their own presses in the first place?

Depends on what you call major. But it certainly isn't just Oxford, Harvard, and the like. Pretty much all US "University of X" (where X is a state) have their own presses.

Yeah, and see, I'm not claiming that the University of, say, Wyoming, has the money to keep their own press running. But the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and the like... they definitely do.

They usually cap the number of books they publish a year. Artificial scarcity makes their imprimatur more desirable.

Lol, we have the opposite problem—we need to have more books.

If we want to have more books, we need to protect the rights of the publishers—if publishers are not protected, then the market is just doing its job: publishing books is not going to be profitable if book contents are stolen without consequences. As a result, universities wouldn’t want to waste money publishing books, and for-profit journals would have to charge exorbitant subscription fees to compensate for the fact that no one except a few institutions will sub in the first place (everyone else will get the same stuff washed through an LLM).

The barrier to publishing a book is more or less non-existent. The barrier to getting a publisher’s name that is sufficient for someone to think (rightly or wrongly) that this book has a legit stamp of approval is somewhat higher if not all that high. And obviously implies that those publishers have to gatekeep to some degree.

Sure, we turn away crap, but so what? We don’t have a cap on how many books we can publish other than the time, labor, and money resources we have. Which are finite. We could publish more than we do now, and we have in the past.

For sure, but do we want the academic publishing landscape to be an oligopoly?

This is the current membership roster of the AUP:

https://aupresses.org/membership/membership-list/

You would be surprised. University of Michigan Publishing, one of the largest and wealthiest of the publics only has a staff of ~30, some of whom are shared with other departments. The university's annual contribution is well under $2 million. The entire University Library, the second largest research library in the U.S. after Harvard, has an annual budget of $64m (0.58% of the entire budget).

I think historically the larger presses were expected to be close to revenue neutral. They do well enough to limp along, but don't get the resources really needed to build new infra. As a cost center without significant tuition or grant funding, the library has little pull when provosts form their priorities.

Maybe if the university presidents and deans weren't looting the coffers for themselves, the publishing unit would have funding?

Talking about "the budget" is meaningless in this context, you could similarly argue that Bill Gates can't afford to buy his kids bubblegum on any given day. After all his self-imposed budget for them is $10/day.

Look at the size and growth of the university's endowment.

Unfortunately talking about the "size and growth of the endowment" is similarly meaningless in this context for a number of reasons. Even if the funds were not restricted in a way that excluded funding the University Press, it's probably a poor measure of whether a University could "afford" to support a press.

This trend is generally true for print. If smaller presses don't go out of business, due to the advantage of newer facilities, they are subsidized or bought out by bigger players.

From a bugeting perspective that is not quite how it works. Journal subscriptions come out of the libraries' budgets. I am a production editor at a uni press, and our budget is a separate item that is not affected directly by the library's problems. But we do have our own budget that we are expected to make. There is some endowment money--we have a fund specifically earmarked to help offset production expenses. We use it to subsidize some titles that we want to be able to offer at something like 'trade' prices but would otherwise be too expensive. Otherwise we are expected to cover our expenses through sales and other income streams like subrights. Heck, the university even expects us to pay for maintenance on our building.

Seems like universities have enough power that they could jailbreak themselves from this situation, right?

It's a massive coordination problem. Few universities have the resources, even if central admin had a clue. Even UC Berkeley's fight with Elsevier was a huge undertaking: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/16/ucs-deal-with-elsevier-...

For most, that means collaborating with others. UC system and B1G academic alliance are making moves, but it's herding cats. Even within universities, it's a nightmare of competing interests. How do you convince your faculty to publish through your own press or consortium instead of the higher impact factor journal owned by Elsevier?

This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it. I imagine that it's some administrators near the top that would block anyone from saying "let's have no-one publish to Elsevier any more" because John from Elsevier takes them on such lovely days out in bespoke locations, staying in boutique hotels.

> This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it

If you ignore the hardest part of the problem; getting everyone to agree and coordinate, then yes it’s a simple problem to solve! You can simplify any problem like this, just ignore the hard part!

What if a paper was a collaboration between 3 universities across the world?

Publishing in high impact factor journals is a big deal. At the very least, I think that the powers that be would have to implement guarantees that publishing in a lower impact factor campus publication wouldn't hurt a researcher's chances of receiving tenure.

> At the very least, I think that the powers that be would have to implement guarantees that publishing in a lower impact factor campus publication wouldn't hurt a researcher's chances of receiving tenure.

This honestly sounds like something that should be doable by the university.

Remember that many of the decision-makers are academics with great publishing records. They succeeded at the game and don't want to rules to be changed.

Also, just practically, the journals help a lot in assessing candidates. Even in fields just adjacent to mine, I might trust an endorsement by a good journal over my own judgments. Often I know the work of the editors there and value their judgment. Chasing after highest impact factor journal publications has its problems, but I haven't seen better proposals.

Some people seem to believe that all the world's problems are easily solvable if only someone would yell at a lot of other people.

To bring this back to HN topics, anyone have tips on trying to suss out that trait in hiring managers during interviews?

I don't know why you mentioned yelling. No one is yelling. Undesirable hiring managers are easy to spot: they have poor reading comprehension.

That’s…actually hilarious advise that I think probably has quite a bit of merit to it.

"If you don't let our faculty publish in these journals, their publication stats will suffer (fewer citations, lower impact factor) and that will translate into lower rankings for our university."

Bigwigs at universities care about rankings, even if they are basically garbage.

Telling tenured professors where to publish is not going to happen. You might entice them with good contracts, but the revenue from most books and articles is very small. The satisfaction and credibility of an Oxford or MIT Press book is worth more than a few thousand bucks to many people.

> It's a massive coordination problem. Few universities have the resources, even if central admin had a clue.

We should all just mercilessly mock Harvard and its ilk, because they have the resources to do pretty much anything.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...

Seems right up the AAU’s alley.

They could! They'd have to also change how faculty review and tenure work, to incentivize faculty to publish in alternative open access journals instead of the top (paywalled) journals in their field. Otherwise, faculty will continue publishing with the for-profit publishers even if there's alternatives available.

There are a for proft open access journals. In most open access journals, the payment system is just reversed. The author/s pay a huge amount of money as publication fees (usually a couple of thousands) instead of readers (or their institutions) paying for the article or the journal subscription.

Heck, even the widely hated publishing companies offer open access. It just costs thousands of dollars for an article and tens of thousands of dollars for a book.

Why would any researcher want to pay it?

Most of the time, it is not even up to the researchers to decide that. Open access is usually a requirement by the funding agencies. For example, in the US all federally funded research will be required to be published on open access journals and will be enforced at the end of 2025[1]

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/ostp...

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