In light of this being Open Access week, I thought I’d share a story about attempts to restrict the flow of information through excessive monetization and metering. Last week, Joshua Gans, a professor of strategic management, argued in an article at FT.com that the Financial Times should drop the Harvard Business Review (HBR) from its list of journals that is uses to rank MBA and EMBA programs (the number of times a school’s faculty publish in 45 key journals is part of the ranking criteria). Gans suggests that because of the exclusive deal that Harvard Business School Press (HBSP) struck with EBSCO that requires schools to pay an additional course use fee for HBR articles used in classes, that journal is now in a special category of publications that is distinctly different from the other 44 titles that FT uses for its ranking criteria. Gans suggests that HBR is now being treated similarly to the case studies series that HBSP.
The next day, Das Narayandas, a senior associate dean and Executive Education and Publishing at the Harvard Business School, responded on the FT.com site with an article that argued HBR is so special and valuable it was fair to charge extra:
But high-quality information – ideas that have been carefully crafted by authors and editors to make sense to managers and to achieve maximum impact – comes at a cost.
One hopes that other publishers don’t follow suit and argue that they too have journals that are equally special and start striking similarly restrictive deals with aggregators like EBSCO and ProQuest.
