Pirate Philosophy by Gary Hall

Author:Gary Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2016-05-03T17:15:31+00:00

81. In his Guardian article Monbiot writes that the “average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930” (Monbiot, “Academic Publishers Make Murdoch”). Meanwhile, Heather Morrison argues that Elsevier’s 2009 profits alone could support a global, fully open access scholarly publishing system (Heather Morrison, “Elsevier 2009 $2 Billion Profits Could Fund Worldwide OA at $1,383 per Article,” Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, April 27, 2010, http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/elsevier-2009-2-billion-profits-could.html). The Economist reports Elsevier as making profits of £780m from revenues of £2.1 billion in 2012 (“No Peeking … ,” Economist, January 11, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21593408-publishing-giant-goes-after-authors-its-journals-papers-no-peeking). Recent research reveals that in the UK, just nineteen universities belonging to the Russell group spent “over £14.4 million (excluding VAT) on subscriptions to journals published by Elsevier alone” (Michelle Brook, “The Cost of Academic Publishing,” Open Access Working Group, April 24, 2014, http://access.okfn.org/2014/04/24/the-cost-of-academic-publishing/). See also Tim Gower, “Elsevier—the Facts,” Gower’s Weblog, April 24, 2014, http://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/.

82. http://thecostofknowledge.com.

83. David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley, and Kenneth Weir, “What Are We to Do with Feral Publishers?” Organization 19 (November 2012).

84. According to an analysis published by the Guardian, “four US companies—Amazon, Facebook, Google and Starbucks—paid just £30m tax on sales of £3.1bn” in the four years stretching from 2008 to 2012. To put this in context, “collecting the taxes that these companies have wriggled out of would go a long way to shrinking the deficit for which working- and middle-class Britain’s living standards are being sacrificed,” not to mention funding for universities. Seumus Milne, “A Roll Call of Corporate Rogues Who Are Milking the Country,” Guardian, October 30, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/roll-call-corporate-rogues-tax.

85. Harvie et al., “What Are We to Do.” According to Lilley, Harvie et al. came across “companies enjoying profit margins as high as 53 per cent on academic publishing. That compares with 6.9 per cent for electricity utilities, 5.2 per cent for food suppliers and 2.5 per cent for newspapers” (Simon Lilley, “How Publishers Feather Their Nests on Open Access to Public Money,” Times Higher Education, November 1, 2012, 30–31). Indeed, they identify “only two other industries where these sorts of return are on offer: that in illegal drugs and the delivery of university-level business education” (Harvie et al., “What Are We to Do”).Nor do independent publishers escape their attention. Harvie et al. also call on editors, writers, and readers to abandon Organization, the journal in which they published their paper, and start up an identical yet more affordable alternative, if its publisher, Sage, which has an operating profit margin of a little below 19 percent and “gross profit across both books and journals of over 60 per cent,” does not lower its prices to those of a comparable society title, “such as the £123 charged for the AMJ or the £182 for ASQ.” Here again, the adoption of a similar stance by editors, writers, and readers of critical theory and philosophy would have consequences for

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