Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/53

 However, it is important to stress that not all commercial publishers are alike, particularly when speaking of the humanities. Indeed, there are many small, independent humanities presses with no proﬁt-driven agenda who can only dream of Elsevier’s margins. University presses, covered below, are also ‘commercial’ in some senses but often have different mission statements and levels of proﬁtability; speciﬁcally, an obligation to publish on the basis of quality. Many commercial presses also doubtlessly act out of a motivation to facilitate scholarly communication. Some of these publishers, therefore, dissent from open access not because they will lose massive proﬁts, but rather because they fear that their business model will collapse under OA and that the labour needed to support their mission will no longer be viable.

This important point aside, there are also, though, both mega-publishers who operate in the humanities sphere and ongoing campaigns of top-loading acquisitions of smaller publishers by large conglomerates that span the humanities and the sciences (take for instance the fact that Palgrave Macmillan is a sister company of Nature publishing group). One of these latter types seems to be Taylor & Francis/Routledge. This publisher, known to humanities scholars for its range of journals and book publications, has, in recent times, begun seeking the views of its scholar-base on open access. However, advocates have charged that the methodology of their surveys betrays an implicit bias against OA through leading poll statements on topics such as: ‘Open access journals are lower quality than subscription journals.’79 Certainly, this publisher has a vested commercial interest in the subscription system. In terms of turnover, Informa Group, which owns Taylor & Francis and Routledge, posted a ‘record’ adjusted operating margin of 28.4% in 2012 with a £349.7m adjusted operating proﬁt;80 38% of this came from Informa’s publishing revenue, including their humanities division, which was, in the words of their annual shareholder report, ‘dominated by subscription assets with high renewal rates, where customers generally pay us twelve months in advance. This provides strong visibility on revenue and allows the businesses to essentially fund themselves, with minimal external capital required.’ For publishers thriving in this environment, regardless of whether this limits those who can read research work, to use their own words: ‘It is a uniquely