The market for medical journals is anticompetitive, says expert

The market for scientific and medical journals is suffering from “true market failure,” says Mark McCabe, an economist who worked for the US Department of Justice's antitrust division for seven years.

The result, said McCabe, who is now an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is that prices for journals have risen around 200% in the past 10 years, but the number of journals has fallen by only 5-10% (Information Today www.infotoday.com/it/dec02/poynder.htm). Libraries have met the increases by cutting other parts of their budgets, including the purchase of books.

McCabe was assigned by the Department of Justice to look at the merger between Wolters Kluwer and Reed Elsevier in 1998. Traditional economic models …