Subject: ARL Announces..ARL Statement on Reed Elsevier's Acquisition of Harcourt General
Julia C Blixrud (jblix@arl.org)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 15:56:59 -0400 (EDT)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 15:56:59 -0400 (EDT) From: Julia C Blixrud <jblix@arl.org> To: ARL-ANNOUNCE List <arl-announce@arl.org> Subject: ARL Announces..ARL Statement on Reed Elsevier's Acquisition of Harcourt General Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0105071540290.6452-100000@mx.arl.org>
May 7, 2001
ARL Announces . . .
ARL Statement on Reed ElsevierŐs Acquisition of Harcourt General
TodayŐs announcement from the U.S. Department of Justice clearing the
way for the merger of Reed Elsevier and Harcourt directly affects the
academic, research, and library communities.
Because of the way publisher price increases have shaped the scholarly
publishing marketplace during the past decade, Association of Research
Library (ARL) members remain very concerned about the ongoing
consolidation of the publishing industry. We believe that continued
extraordinary price increases will severely erode the academic journal
marketplace. In the aggregate, ARL libraries spend over $900 million
per year on books and journals to support the information resource needs
of faculty, students, and the public. But these dollars have been
unable to keep pace with the inflation in the cost of materials from
commercial publishers. For example, science, technology, and medical
journals from commercial publishers have increased in price about 11% a
year between 1990 and 2000, at a time when the consumer price index
increased at an annual rate of just 2.6%.
As has been documented elsewhere, mergers and acquisitions have a
negative impact on pricing policies. Data shows that after the purchase
of Pergamon Press by Elsevier Science (a Reed Elsevier company) in
1990-91, the price of Pergamon biomedical titles increased 27% while the
Elsevier titles increased in price about 5.2%. Similarly, after the
purchase of Lippincott by Wolters Kluwer that same year, Lippincott
titles experienced a 25% post-merger price increase. These data
demonstrate that modest transactions that may not rise to the
concentration thresholds of current antitrust guidelines could in fact
enhance the market power of the merging companies and significantly
increase the price of scholarly journals, among other publishing areas.
Although the Reed Elsevier acquisition of Harcourt General was today
allowed to proceed without challenge, we hope that this merger does not
follow the pattern of previous mergers, whereby consolidation negatively
impacted the academic, research and library communities.
In addition, we note that this merger is still under review in the U.K.
ARL and its members will monitor closely developments in pricing that
follow this merger, and document any erosion of librariesŐ ability to
provide information resources for their constituencies. As advocates
for scholars, researchers, students and the public, ARL will continue to
work to assure that library materials remain within the reach of the
broadest possible community, and that pricing and access policies ensure
access for generations to come.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a membership organization
representing more than 120 of the largest research libraries in North
America. It is located on the Web at http://www.arl.org. For detailed
information and data on scholarly publishing and the impact of publisher
price increases, please see: http://www.arl.org/scomm and
http://www.arl.org/scomm/resources.html.
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Julia C. Blixrud <jblix@arl.org>
Director of Information Services, ARL <www.arl.org>
Assistant Director, Public Programs, SPARC <www.arl.org/sparc/>
21 Dupont Circle, Washington DC 20036
Tel: (202) 296-2296 ext.133 Fax: (202) 872-0884 Cell: (202) 251-4678
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