Re: Price discrimination for academic subscriptions (discussion)

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@worldnet.att.net>]

I believe Dr. Goodman is exactly right about this topic.  The implications
are far-reaching.  Publishers (and I am one) have long known that
libraries represent a special market, for two reasons:  librarians pay
their bills (don't underestimate the importance of this) and librarians
are in the business not of purchasing materials but of using what is in
their budget to purchase materials. The budget always gets spent.  This is
not true in other markets.  My daughter will walk into the Gap and may
walk out without having made a purchase.  Librarians spend the money
allotted to them.

Publishers work toward the budget.  Their job is to get the money that is
already in the budget, and that's it.  Many items are published simply
because it is known in advance that they will be purchased--because the
budget always gets spent.  I know; I have published some of these--and, I
should add, with economic success.  Step out of an academic library into
the reference section of a public library for a moment and ask who wanted
these books and who uses them.  By and large, we don't know.  
Noncirculating hardcopy publications leave no trace of use behind other
than anecdote.

With usage logs, librarians have an opportunity to sharpen their
acquisitions considerably.  While popularity (amount of usage) is hardly
the only measure of the merits of a publication, it certainly is a factor.  
It will become easier to drop some publications, freeing up money for
others. It will make publishing harder--and that's good, because only the
better publishers will survive the advent of sophisticated policies
concerning usage logs.  Usage logs will tend to migrate publishers'
strategies from channel dominance (a la Reed) to editorial selection.  I
fear I sound hopelessly old-fashioned.

An interesting project would be for librarians to use these logs to take
over the "professional-reputation" business, which is now largely the
province of Thomson/ISI.  By aggregating the logs of multiple (all?)
institutions, a better picture than ISI provides of use and citations can
be assembled.  This could be run as a consortium, competing with Thomson.  
And why not?

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 8:05 PM
Subject: RE: Price discrimination for academic subscriptions (discussion)

> 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