QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Thu 21st July 2011, 11:06am)
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The closest to scientific publishing Hollywood would be Elsevier, which publishes 2000 journals out of 70 offices in 24 countries. Also about 1900 books a year. They have 7000 employees and annual revenues of 1.5 billion pounds (US $2.43 billion). That's not in the Hollywood league of course, but neither is it chump change, and it completely gives the lie to the idea that there's no money in academic publishing. I don't really care what "most" scientific publishers make. How do you even define a scientific publisher? You can say it's two guys in a garage and claim that "most" don't make money. However, the journals that have a high
impact factor are published by people like Elsevier and NPG (Nature Publishing Group). The last is a Macmillan division that publishes ~30 journals, so I cannot find out its finances, but if Elsevier makes a profit, I think it's safe to say that NPG does also. University libraries are starting to boycott Elsevier's prices, in fact.
Springer is another interesting German company that does mostly science books and high end science texts and reference books (no journals). Also some econ, law and social science stuff, but it's all heavily academic, and they look at author-credentials with a very heavy hand. They make $1.25 billion a year.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/commonsbasedr...th_focus_on_BGPhttp://company.monster.com/elsevi.aspx....
I'm a tad confused as to why you think Academia = Scientific. Many pop science journals are sold, which make far more money but they shouldn't be even considered in this discussion.
By the way, your example makes 880 millions total. "7,000 journal editors, 70,000 editorial board members and 200,000 reviewers are working for Elsevier" work for the company. Based on that many employees, less than 1 billion pre-taxed profit (remember, it hasn't been taxed yet or the rest) is incredibly tiny.
I find it odd how you refuse to look at the majority of academic publishers, which are universities.
Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, etc, are major ones. But there are thousands of university publishers, many with journals. The ones that do make a profit publish things other than academic journals (things like dictionaries that can sell a lot of).
Then there is this: "However, the journals that have a high
impact factor " Most journals don't have a "high impact factor".
A journal like
http://www.rc.umd.edu/ksaa/ksj/index.html the Keats and Shelley Journal would be an example of a top level journal representing my field. Although it is top of its specialty, it is incredibly tiny and has no budget. They make no money off of it. No one does. There are hundreds of similar journals in English literary criticism. That is just one field among thousands in "academia", each with similarly situated journals.
I think this is just a difference between those with exposure to academic presses and those without. Sigh.
This post has been edited by Ottava: