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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Belen" data-source="post: 9632733" data-attributes="member: 1405">There was a shift to cheaper labor and production in China. This increased margins and slowed price increases. It is not just companies that chose to move production to China, we also had US printers move plants to China to increase their own margins. Add to this that many print shops like Sheridan and Cadmus have been consolidated by large globals. The printer capacity remains in the US but a lot of the work is outsourced so volume is down considerably.My own industry did the same thing. They outsourced editorial assistants and journal managers to India and China. Our clients received a service that was much worse but the commercial publishers made bank on margins. This is still the case for STM publications. The difference in operational quality is dependent on whether you have US/EU team members or outsource those jobs. This is why most societies continue to insist on retaining local talent.China was also using currency manipulation and state-supported manufacturing to artificially reduce prices and undercut competition and global companies love it because it increases margins.That said, bringing back manufacturing is complex and much of the infrastructure would have to be rebuilt. I do not know the solution.For my industry, I doubt the jobs will return. In-house or commercially owned publications will continue to outsource because large publishers stopped caring about quality and only want volume. They want to see more content published in order to justify price increases for their aggregator sites that they sell to institutions. In fact, they push scientific journals to accept lower quality content just to keep growth. That should scare anyone. Open Access has also largely been a disaster as it is ripe for fraud and it places the costs to publish on authors rather than spreading them around to large subscriber bases.Publications owned by societies and licensed to commercial publishers do still insist on quality although they are moving to accept more lower quality science by starting bucket journals where rejected articles go where authors can pay to publish.Everything is just a complex mess.</blockquote>

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