Re: Heads up: Nature license and confidentiality

[Warren Holder <warren.holder@utoronto.ca>]

Rick, If you prefer, we can have this discussion off-line - my 
actual preference would be over a drink or three...

Is there any place in your thinking for what one might call a " 
loyalty " programme. Let's use Elsevier as an example [there are 
others of course]. Let's say a university spends in excess of [US 
$X Million] a year on their journals as well as Scopus, 
Compendex, Embase, DiscoveryGate etc. etc. Then this publisher 
produces their archive. In your mind is a university wrong if it 
wants aggressively to negotiate the price based on their rather 
large commitment to a given publisher? Do you really think they 
should pay the same price as everyone else?

Just curious.

Warren Holder
Electronic Resources Co-ordinator
University of Toronto Libraries
Toronto, Ontario CANADA M5S 1A5
warren.holder@utoronto.ca
www.library.utoronto.ca/its/warren.html


Rick Anderson wrote:

> > I'm slightly suprised that librarians find anything odd in
> > this.
> It's not really that we find secret pricing odd; it's that we
> find it unacceptable (or I do, anyway -- I shouldn't presume to
> speak for everyone else).
>
> > In the print world, the price was the price.  In the digital
> > world, as Peggy says herself, 'we don't all pay the price';
> > actual prices paid by individual consortia and even individual
> > libraries tend to be the result of often protracted
> > negotiation. Different factors may have a bearing in each case.
> > So making public the price actually negotiated would be most
> > unfair on the vendor, wouldn't it?
> I can see why publishers find transparent pricing undesirable,
> but I really don't see how they can claim that it's unfair.  If
> you're going to sell a product or service to the public, then it
> seems to me that the public has a right to know how much it's
> paying.  (If you're selling to a private institution, then you
> may be able to negotiate terms of secrecy into the deal -- but it
> doesn't seem to me that the institution is under any moral
> obligation to agree.  "Fairness" certainly doesn't enter into it.
> I see no logical connection between the fact that prices and
> license terms vary from institution to institution as a matter of
> negotiation and the proposition that they should be kept secret
> as a matter of fairness.)
>
> ----
> Rick Anderson
> Dir. of Resource Acquisition
> University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
> rickand@unr.edu