From the paleontologists who bring you the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week comes documentation that of all the major commercial scholarly publishers, Wiley (publisher of all American Anthropological Association journals, including Cultural Anthropology which Kim Fortun and I co-edited from 2006-2010, an experience which turned us into complete Open Access advocates) managed to suck the greatest percentage of profit out of its system of volunteer labor and captured libraries in 2010 or early 2011 — 42%, beating out Elsevier’s 36%:
In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers. The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist. It all checks out. I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe. Here they are again: profits as a percentage of revenue for commercial STM publishers in 2010 or early 2011:
- Elsevier: £724m on revenue of £2b — 36%
- Springer‘s Science+Business Media: £294m on revenue of £866m — 33.9%
- John Wiley & Sons: $106m on revenue of $253m — 42%
- Academic division of Informa plc: £47m on revenue of £145m — 32.4%
Check out their links to Heather Morrisson’s dissertation research too.