LexisNexis parent company, Reed Elsevier, drops prices in face of boycott

 Alex Hawkes (@alexhawkes) reports in the UK’s This is Money this morning that LexisNexis parent, ‘Reed Elsevier in U-turn as boycott bites.’

Reed Elsevier has slashed the price of one of its magazine titles amid a boycott over the prices of its publications. Almost 8,000 academics around the world are refusing to write for the publisher’s journals, accusing it of charging ‘exorbitantly high prices’. Reed suddenly cut the annual subscription price of Explorations In Economic History from £58 to £31 after the journal’s editor Dr Tim Leunig publicly criticised the group’s reaction to the boycott.

Dr Tim Leunig (@timleunig), editor of Reed Elsevier’s Explorations In Economic History, publicly criticized the response to the boycott by Reed Elsevier CEO Erik Engstrom as a merely a misunderstanding with its contributors, editors, and purchasers.

He should be honest and state that in many cases his journals have an element of monopoly power.

Imagine law firms and libraries standing up to the LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters Westlaw duopoly and getting a 47% price reduction in packaged legal research. With companies such as Justia and Fastcase working on making the law free, the day is going to come. The Reed Elsevier response to the boycott, which I wrote about here, is only going to bring increasing pressure from the financial community that Reed Elsevier sell LexisNexis, which I have written about here and here.