The enormous profits of STM scholarly publishers

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As reported in the Economist (2011): “ Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%”. Springer’s Science + Business Media (2010) reported a return on sales (operating profit) of 33.9% or € 294 million on revenue of € 866 million, an increase of 4% over the profit of the previous year [..]

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Hot damn.. These guys are raking it in! And for what? They are simply capitalizing on a made-up inefficiency in the “market” that should not exist in the first place. One of the signs of the new age should be all such companies going bust.