RE: Price discrimination for academic subscriptions (discussion)

[martin@skmassociates.net]

To add a bit of history, in the "print era", we used to speculate that the
journal itself might be going the way of the dinosaur, and that in the
electronic era, the intellectual (and economic) entity would be the
journal article instead.

With this as a premise, we suggested that those journals that held
subscribers by publishing one good article amid a bunch of dross would
have their work cut out to remain viable, since people would pay only for
the good article.

The publishers - large ones, anyway - apparently listened to this
conversation and preempted us consumers by coming up with 'big deals,'
licenses and packages of journals.  These techniques are obviously
artifical constructs designed to keep the economics of the print era
going.

As David has suggested, we are approaching the point at which real
economic decisions will have to be made, rather than artificial ones.

Sue Martin
Visiting Program Officer for Scholarly Communication
Association of College and Research Libraries

On Wed,  3 Sep 2003 23:05:52 EDT, "David Goodman" wrote:

> In the print era, it was very different when we paid *for what we
> might be likely to use*.  The difficulty in obtaining items rapidly 
> unless they were purchased in advance of possible use was much greater 
> than it need be today. Thus, the extent to which a library purchased in 
> advance meant the extent to which it could promply fill patrons' 
> (unpredictable) needs.  The libaries that could afford to do so 
> extensively were the great libraries, the ones where good researchers 
> wanted, because they alone could be efficient for far-reaching 
> requirements.
> 
> This of course need not be the case any longer. Thus the point of Phil's
> discusssion is that paying by the article is an equalizer--any library
> prepared to to buy online material by the article without staff 
> mediation can deliver anything (that is so available) instantaneously.
> 
> The economic problem for the publishers, is that even the best libraries
> can also take advantage of this technique, at least for the less-used
> materials. Thus the revenue that publishers have been in the habit of
> getting from the libraries that bought (almost) everything in advance will
> not be there. This revenue can be large, and I am not sure that the
> revenue from the many small libraries buying what they previously couldn't
> have afforded will equal it. There was a time as selector in such a
> library when I would unquestionably buy a $500 journal if it were used
> even once every few years, and a $5000 one used a few times a year. It's
> been a while, of course, since I deliberately did that--but the difference
> between the major and minor libraries remained the level of cost per use
> they were willing to accept. Now it can be the same for everyone.
> 
> Will this provide enough revenue to keep the current system going with
> affordable prices per use? It would seem in principal that it could be
> revenue-neutral. In practice, I suspect that seeing the true costs and
> use more directly will and should lead to a somewhat changed system, in
> which some types of journals from some sources may no longer have a 
> role.
> 
> Dr. David Goodman
> dgoodman@liu.edu