4 ms·

Elsevier had/has also a profit margin at about 35%. As a small structure you can achieve that but at a very large scale, this is effectively the sign that natu

by Loic 5y ago

Elsevier had/has also a profit margin at about 35%. As a small structure you can achieve that but at a very large scale, this is effectively the sign that natural competition is not working as expected.

tux3 5y ago
I'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like. Peer review is not their purview, right? And I don't believe they pay the original authors a portion of each sale. Or that they need much of an advertising budget. What's the cost structure look like for a company like this one? With all due cynicism, has their been public research on the sort of clever accounting tricks a company with Elsevier's business model must surely be using to keep their profit margin as low as 35% ..?
- suprfsat 5y ago
  Lobbying against open access, suing SciHub, threatening authors for self-publishing, yachts,
- jpeloquin 5y ago
  > I'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like. Me too. Their investor relations report [0] is the best source I know of, but it's pretty vague. I only see breakdowns of revenue, no details regarding operating costs. PLOS One is transparent regarding their costs though [1]: - 46% publishing, editorial - 18% publishing, production - 15% publishing, technology - 16% general & admin - 5% publication fee rebates [0] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/results/results-presentations/2020-results-presentation.pdf https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re... [1] https://plos.org/financial-overview/ https://plos.org/financial-overview/
therealEleix 5y ago
"Natural Competition" in this space can never be. What you're seeing is exactly how this space turns out. Verisign controls the registry for the .com TLD. They run the centralized authority that ultimately says if a .com domain is "legit" or not. The Registrars like Namecheap and friends are just the messengers authorized to register .com domains into this larger database and they pay Verisign for the privilege to do so. While it's possible for anyone to go out and stand up their own .COM zone in DNS, any domains created by that registrar don't actually exist in the eyes of the larger Internet and will not work.

by Loic 5y ago

tux3 5y ago

I'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like. Peer review is not their purview, right? And I don't believe they pay the original authors a portion of each sale. Or that they need much of an advertising budget. What's the cost structure look like for a company like this one? With all due cynicism, has their been public research on the sort of clever accounting tricks a company with Elsevier's business model must surely be using to keep their profit margin as low as 35% ..?

suprfsat 5y ago
Lobbying against open access, suing SciHub, threatening authors for self-publishing, yachts,
jpeloquin 5y ago
> I'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like. Me too. Their investor relations report [0] is the best source I know of, but it's pretty vague. I only see breakdowns of revenue, no details regarding operating costs. PLOS One is transparent regarding their costs though [1]: - 46% publishing, editorial - 18% publishing, production - 15% publishing, technology - 16% general & admin - 5% publication fee rebates [0] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/results/results-presentations/2020-results-presentation.pdf https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re... [1] https://plos.org/financial-overview/ https://plos.org/financial-overview/

therealEleix 5y ago

"Natural Competition" in this space can never be. What you're seeing is exactly how this space turns out. Verisign controls the registry for the .com TLD. They run the centralized authority that ultimately says if a .com domain is "legit" or not. The Registrars like Namecheap and friends are just the messengers authorized to register .com domains into this larger database and they pay Verisign for the privilege to do so. While it's possible for anyone to go out and stand up their own .COM zone in DNS, any domains created by that registrar don't actually exist in the eyes of the larger Internet and will not work.