Watch This Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry Evaporate Overnight
June 9th, 2014Via: Linkedin:
Imagine an industry where a few companies make billions of dollars by exerting strict control over valuable information — while paying the people who produce that information nothing at all.
That’s the state of academic, scientific publishing today. And it’s about to be blown wide open by much more open, Internet-based publishers.
This will unfold over the next few years. It will become a classic case study in technological disruption.
Academic journals are a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide — maybe $10 billion annually. It’s dominated by a handful of publishers: Elsevier, with $3.2 billion in revenues in 2012, and Springer, with $1.1 billion in the same year.
Both companies boast margins in excess of 35 percent, thanks in part to their low cost of content production. Scientists who want to publish the results of their research submit their manuscripts to these publishers’ journals (free); other scientists review those papers to assess their credibility and quality (free); and then the journals publish the papers, selling subscriptions to universities and corporations who need them (definitely not free).
