German article: Crisis of periodical pricing

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

The URL below links to a PDF file containing a 16 page exchange of 8
letters between the fictional publishers, "Karl Buchmacher" and "Harold
Moneymaker," all in German.  The correspondence is meant to give an
amusing form to the point-counterpoint debate.  The 'editor's postscript'
gives a sense of the upshot:

"With this letter, the exchange of letters between Moneymaker and
Bookmaker breaks off.  Of course, this doesn't end discussion on the theme
of the 'Journals Crisis."  The letters, however, make one thing very
clear:  the 'Journals Crisis' is only superficially a problem of
libraries.  It is really a problem for science/scholarship (Wissenschaft)
and for the scholarly/scientific publication enterprise, especially in STM
faculties.  We would hope that future discussion would be carried on where
it belongs, with help from the libraries of course.  In the very recent
past there is some encouraging indication that some academics and some
publishers have recognized this and taken up the challenge, along with
librarians."

Thanks to Karl-Josef Ziegler for sending along the citation.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 11:37:12 +0100
From: Karl-Josef Ziegler <kziegler@uni-koblenz.de>
To: Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>
Subject: Crisis of periodical pricing

Dear Ms. Okerson!

Yesterday I got an interesting link about the crisis of periodical
pricing:

<http://www.ub.uni-konstanz.de/kops/volltexte/2004/1155/>

Unfortunately the article is on German, but it's really interesting
constructed as a (fictive) letter exchange between a 'traditional' German
publisher and a 'modern' global publisher (like Elsevier), i.e. altruism
to promote science against profit oriented shareholder value marketing.

Best regards,

- Karl-Josef Ziegler