The Ethics and Economics of Academic Publishing
Routledge will soon release a volume called The Positive and the Normative in Economic Thought, edited by my colleagues Sina Badiei and Agnès Griveaux. It includes a series of contributions from economists and philosophers, including mine, on how the positive and the normative have been articulated in the economic discipline.
I cannot but recommend this book of course, but most of the potential readers will be rebutted by the price of the book – more than a hundred euros for the hardback edition, and more than thirty euros for the ebook version. This is of course not new, especially with non-university-related publishers, even though Cambridge or Oxford university press can also sometimes unreasonably price their book. I’m an economist, so I’m not naïve about this. Academic books, especially collective volumes on specialized topics have a very thin targeted readership while publishers must cover their costs, including fixed costs. Because few copies are printed, the latter have a significant weight in the pricing decision. There is moreover a strategic and marketing rationale: for-profit-publishers like Routledge want foremost to sell their books to university libraries, which will be willing to pay a higher price than individual readers. They release the overprice hardback edition first, and after a year or two release the cheaper paperback edition to less-willing-to-pay and more patient buyers. So, basically, what Routledge is doing is a form of price discrimination through which universities are contributing to the book consumption of other agents. There is nothing original, as anyone acquainted with the discipline of industrial organization will know.
But the way academic publishing works poses some ethical questions, and I’m here only speaking of books, not scientific articles for which ethical troubles are even bigger. First, many universities and their libraries are public, so basically the move consists in making the taxpayers pay for a small minority of persons. There is also a different concern, not related as such to the pricing strategies of academic publishers. In some rare but still significant cases, academics who publish books (often halfway academic, halfway “popular”) make money out of them, sometimes huge money actually. These books are written as part of professional activities for which scholars are already paid for by their universities, and so the taxpayer in the case of public universities. I have not seen many discussions of the obvious ethical issue that emerges: that the monetary returns from sales go into the academic’s pocket and not at least partly to those who pay for the activity is just grossly unfair on any plausible basis. To be fair, I may be simply ignorant and maybe in some very specific cases publishing contracts have special clauses about this. And these cases are fairly exceptional.
Anyways, whatever the extent of this ethical issue, I would not regard a mechanism that redistributes “by force” the monetary returns to the university as a better one. I think however that these ethical troubles call for a simple solution: we should collectively strive for open-access academic publishing, not only for scientific articles (something that academic institutions are increasingly pushing for) but also for books. This would not be a Pareto-improving move (the lucky few among academics who have established a reputation that guarantees them significant returns from each of their books would lose a lot), but clearly a fairness-improving one along the Pareto frontier!