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Re: Information Access Alliance Urges DOJ & FTC to Explore Remedies for Journal Bundling: Comments Available on Web

I am sorry that Ray, whose abilities as an advocate I admire, has added his last two sentences. All of us have "day jobs" but to post in this tendentious fashion and then refuse to answer comments seems to me to be inappropriate. I can see that he might not want to answer comments because his has in fact contradicted himself. No library or library consortia have to enter into these big deals. That is the fact. Surely all publishers still offer their journals one by one. This is the alternative. All this stuff about anti-competitive seems to me to be a waste of the funding that tax payers eventually give to the ARL. But I am not a lawyer

I have a long record of being doubtful about Big Deals and published in Against-the-Grain some time ago expressing these doubts. However the Big Deals were not a nasty plot of commercial publishers. The first such arrangements were as a result of serious and productive conversations between people like Tom Sanville and emissaries of JISC in the UK talking to senior publishers how the benefits of the digital environment could be passed on to the scholars. The enthusiasm for such deals among publishers and librarians is a matter of history.

The economic framework for the deals is agreed to be less than perfect by all parties including publishers but so far no alternative model has got acceptance. Pieter Bolman (an originator of the current model when he was CEO of Academic) told a meeting last year that he was amazed the original model is still more or less in place. That model was (as described at the time) a win/win/win arrangement and any new model needs to be the same.

I can understand the problem for librarians. It is sad that the organisations acting on behalf of the library community do not press for more funding instead of mounting the expensive campaigns they do spend their time on. It is needed and will continue to be needed. Whatever model of scholarly communication comes about (assuming that it provides the same level of service as the current model) it likely to continue to be more and more expensive because there is more and more research in the world and more and more publications being submitted and accepted by the peers of peer review as worthwhile. My understanding from the postings of David Goodman is that he sees this problem and argues for a cut down version of the current system - which is honest and productive but is probably (a guess) not wished for by many other scholars.

Anthony Watkinson
Centre for Publishing
University College London

I shall add that my colleagues at UCL are working with a team that includes Carol Tenopir on the usage logs of OhioLink but I am not involved directly in this work.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray English" <Ray.English@oberlin.edu>
To: "Liblicense L" <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 05, 2007 11:26 PM
Subject: Re: Information Access Alliance Urges DOJ & FTC to Explore Remedies
for Journal Bundling: Comments Available on Web

This posting is intended to provide background on why the large electronic journal agreements are of concern to many libraries and why they may be anticompetitive.

Most libraries are faced with virtually an all of nothing choice with the large bundled deals. In most instances the rates of overall price increase for the deals are much higher that the rates of increase for library budgets. Libraries either accept rising prices for the bundle as a whole and let the bundle eat up more and more of their budgets - or they take the drastic step that was recently taken by Norway (in the case of the Blackwell license) and cancel the agreements, living with a total loss of access. It's a rare exception for a consortium to have successfully negotiated some control over content (including the ability to deselect specific titles) that allows them to moderate the overall rate of increase for a specific deal. Most consortia and most libraries are therefore caught in a terrible dilemma, as was described eloquently by Ken Frazier in his classic D-Lib piece several years ago.

See: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html

Libraries either let prices increase at rates greater than their budget increases (with negative effects on subscriptions outside the bundle and on their monograph budgets) or they go cold turkey and try to live with the consequences of lack of access in hopes of getting better terms. Norway is the first example of a group of libraries that's chosen the latter course. It is true that libraries don't have to enter into the agreements. But if they don't, then the prices for individual titles (from the same publisher) that they subscribe to will still continue to increase at rates that are unsustainable and they'll lack the additional journal access that come with the bundled package.

I would guess that most libraries don't feel they don't' actually have a real choice. That's a sentiment that I've heard from several quarters. Even if it was determined by antitrust authorities that libraries do have choice about entering into such agreements, those same authorities might find that aspects of the agreements - in terms of their effect on the broader market - are anticompetitive. That's a legal question that I'm not in a position to answer. But it's also one that I think antitrust authorities need to look at and decide.

The basic argument against the large electronic license agreements is that they may be anticompetitive in two ways. First, by taking away choice on the part of libraries they create budgetary pressure on titles that are not under such agreements, leading to cancellations of those journals. Society journals and independent journals that are not part of electronic packages are therefore particularly vulnerable. Second, the agreements create barriers to entry for new journals, since the new titles can't compete on a title-by-title basis with journals that are in the bundles.

The basic legal argument that the large deals are anticompetitive has been made by Aaron Edlin and Dan Rubenfeld in an article in the Antitrust Law Journal. They've also published a more general economic discussion of electronic licenses in the American Economic Review. See Edlin's website for access to both, specifically the first two pieces under "Antitrust, Industrial Organization, and Competition Policy": http://works.bepress.com/aaron_edlin/

I'm sorry that I won't have time to engage in an ongoing exchange following this post. I offer it for clarification and leave it to others to carry the discussion forward.

Ray English
Director of Libraries
Oberlin College