RE: Open Access pricing and the perceived ability of research

[Guy Dresser <gdresser@allenpress.com>]

It seems to me ironic that after librarians campaigned for years to get
printers to use acid-free paper, and for the paper mills to make it, now
that almost all of the mills making journal and book paper have converted
to the alkaline pulping process librarians are cancelling their print
subscriptions in favor of fragile electronic products. Not that I think
print has a long future, but I wonder if we were wasting our time fighting
that battle.

Guy Dresser

At 01:49 PM 8/18/2003 -0400, David Goodman wrote:
> Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 13:47:49 EDT
> Reply-To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Sender: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
>
> 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]