Re: Confidentiality clause is back in at Nature

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

Joe, There is plenty of scope for competition to restrain prices, 
even in a fully open system.

If a publisher prices too high, subscriptions would drop. A 
rational publisher would year by year increase prices until 
subscriptions began to drop, and then stop, knowing that 
subscriptions, once cancelled, do not often come back.

For this market-driven approach to work, the publisher must still 
be in the price range where demand is elastic. If they price so 
high that everyone has already dropped except a core hundred 
libraries or so that will continue regardless, different factors 
come into play:

a/ even the core reconsidering whether it wants to stay in the 
core for a particular subject, with former core libraries 
accepting per-article access.

b/ the prices being so high that there is a resistance to new 
titles from the same publisher.

c/ the prices overall being so high that libraries look to 
alternative means of publication

Any of those sound familiar?

If there is not price transparency, a rational librarian would be 
all the more ready to consider them, to reduce uncertainty.

Any of these sound familiar with respect to NPG?

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, October 5, 2006 6:37 pm
Subject: Re: Confidentiality clause is back in at Nature
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> Rick,
>
> At the risk of wearing out everyone's patience, I assure you that
> I hear your point, but you are not hearing mine.  You are saying
> that you don't want to be constrained from talking with other
> people about what you paid.  And I am saying, Be careful what you
> wish for.  My point is that transparency will not save you any
> money.  The ONLY way to save money is to negotiate a particularly
> good deal and then not say a word about it.  This, of course, may
> be good for your institution, but it won't be good for the
> others, whose negotiators are not as shrewd.  If everyone has the
> same information, then the publisher will seek the same margin on
> all sales; hence inflexibility.
>
> There are many, many ways to reduce costs for materials, but
> transparency is not one of them.
>
> BTW, in the example of auto dealerships, you say that "you can
> certainly announce price data to the world."  I do not believe
> that is true, though I have no way to prove it.  It is probable
> that dealerships (unlike auto consumers) are bound by
> confidentiality.
>
> Joe Esposito
>
> On 10/4/06, Rick Anderson <rickand@unr.edu> wrote:
>>> You can tell anyone you want how much you paid for a car, but if
>>> you own a dealership, can you announce trade data to the world?
>>
>> You can certainly announce price data to the world, and price
>> data are what we're talking about in this example.  Let me try to
>> save some bandwidth here.  I think I'm using the term
>> "transparency" differently than you and Dick are, Joe.  What I
>> mean by "transparent" pricing is a system that allows buyers to
>> talk freely and publicly about what they've paid.  I don't
>> necessarily mean a situation in which sellers all go out of their
>> way to broadcast publicly every detail of their wholesale and
>> retail practices.
>>
>>> A practical outcome of public posting of licenses is that there
>>> can never be any negotiations.  Thus there never can be any
>>> customization of contracts to account for special circumstances.
>>
>> Transparency (as I'm using the term) doesn't require that
>> publishers publicly post every negotiated version of their
>> licenses.  It only requires that they not forbid their customers
>> from discussing license and pricing terms with others.  (And if
>> what you mean is that public posting of _standard_ license terms
>> precludes negotiations, then that's simply flat wrong.  I've
>> negotiated scores of licenses with publishers whose standard
>> license agreements are posted publicly, and who are yet willing
>> to negotiate a customized version with any buyer who asks.)
>> Nature's contention that secrecy is required in order for them to
>> do business is ridiculous -- scores of similar publishers
>> demonstrate this every day by doing business quite nicely without
>> secrecy.  It may be necessary in order for Nature to do business
>> in a particular way that Nature prefers, but it's Nature's choice
>> to do business that way.  And it's our choice whether or not
>> we'll help them by submitting to vows of secrecy.
>>
>> ----
>> Rick Anderson
>> Dir. of Resource Acquisition
>> University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
>> rickand@unr.edu