In a recent post, T. Scott Plutchak discusses a recent meeting with Elsevier management:

It’s too bad that more librarians can’t spend the kind of time with some of the senior people at Elsevier that I was able to this week. It’s tough to demonize people when you’ve had food and drink with them and have talked passionately about what you believe to be the social importance of what you’re doing. And make no mistake — the people I talked with do believe passionately in the role they play in the whole knowledge creation chain. They believe they are doing good things. I was very impressed with their openness, their eagerness to listen to what I had to say, and their very thoughtful questions and discussion.

I’m sure that’s true to a great extent, and there’s certainly no point in demonizing people who, after all, are just trying to make a honest living.

But the fundamental economic structure of the situation does not change, regardless of whether we think these folks are on the side of good or evil. Elsevier’s primary responsibility is not to researchers, not to librarians, but to its investors. These investors are now used to (and rather like) seeing 30% margins from STM publishing. It’s difficult to see how any management team, whatever its good intentions, would act to disturb those margins. If they did, they would arguably be in breach of their fiscal duties.

But until that 30% margin does change, Libraries are always going to be in a terrible bind insofar as they try to actually pay for the journals their users demand. And that, more than misunderstanding or ill will, is what makes a true partnership between libraries and for-profit publishers hard to imagine.