Re: Comparing Publishers, was: Re: Cambridge Journals Online

[Tony Ferguson <ferguson@columbia.edu>]

We paid the bills for some and not for others.  I think attempts to buy
bargain information without regard to its reputation within the projected
user community are questionable.  Our job is to bring users and
information together, not to do battle with what some perceive to be the
dark side of publishing. I am not advocating paying in silence, but rather
to strive to seek to communicate with the more profitable STM publishers.  
In the end they need us, and we need their information.  

tony

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MARGARET LANDESMAN wrote:

> Of course it's not just price.  But I am spending a substantial portion of
> the trickle of new money to our campus.  We need it for scholarships,
> salaries, and more journals, among other things. I feel I should guard
> every dollar as if it were my own (an unfortunate number of them are).
>
> I object to paying several (or even a couple) thousand dollars for
> something which if done by another and equally "high-quality" publisher
> might cost less.
>
> High priced journals didn't come to be high priced because of their
> superior quality or because they get more uses. They came to be high-
> priced because we paid. I've already done that - in print - and I'm not
> going there again - with the same players - for a bit yet.
>
> This time I want to try first to back good reasonably priced publishers,
> for-profit and not-for-profit, even if they are so out of it on the
> electronic front that it takes some years to educate them.  And I'm
> willing also to back products which have not yet achieved the level of
> quality we need but are moving in that direction and can be expected to
> remain at a reasonable price level (in dollars, not expressed as a
> percentage of where they are now).
>
> Margaret Landesman