RE: Open Access pricing and the perceived ability of research

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

grants to cover publication costs 
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Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 13:47:49 EDT
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I am far from a defender of publishers' current pricing models, but I do
not take seriously that a publisher will deliberately choose to increase
its prices to a level where not a single copy of its products will be
sold.

Additional security is offered by the growing willingness of national
libraries to undertake this fuction. To give some perspective on the
expected survival of institutions, I note that Elsevier has been in
existence longer than Princeton, LC, or the BL.

If one's economic estimates are wildly off, and the survival of permanent
institutions less than expected, part of the contract will have included
the production and dispersal of physical copies, whether in print,
optical, or similar format. If you wish to say that no plan based purely
upon electronic images without physical embodiment will offer sufficient
security, I will not disagree.

David Goodman

-----Original Message-----
From: James A. Robinson [mailto:jim.robinson@stanford.edu]
Sent: Sun 8/17/2003 4:46 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Open Access pricing and the perceived ability of research 
grants to cover publication costs

> It would seem obvious from basic economics that a present sum of money
> could be used to provide an endowment for preservation. I am aware of at
> least one learned society which is doing just that.  The questions of how
> much need to be spent, and how to predict future costs are nonetheless
> real.[SNIP]