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Meeting with President of Elsevier (fwd)

Emily Mobley, the University Librarian at Purdue University, has
made this available for sharing with liblicense-l.  The message has
been shared with other lists as well. 

This matter has been reported in the press, perhaps most visibly in
the New York Times on December 29th.

Ann Okerson
____________

Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 16:25:24 -0500 (EST)
From: Emily Mobley <mobley@omni.cc.purdue.edu>
To: arl-directors@arl.org
Subject: Meeting with President of Elsevier


TO:  ARL Directors

I thought you might be interested in a report on a meeting
which was held at Purdue University two weeks ago with
Russell White, President of Elsevier, at our invitation.
Mr. White met separately with our President and Executive
Vice President of Academic Affairs, and with 14 members of
the faculty as a group.  The genesis of this meeting was a
report by a faculty committee which recommended that
university administrators at the highest levels should meet
with like representatives from the publishing industry to
express the University s concern about continually
escalating serials pricing and the effect such actions were
having on scholarly communications.  This recommendation was
one of several, including one to immediately cancel $600,000
in serials.  We chose to concentrate on Elsevier because in
the last academic year 27% of Purdue s total serials dollars
went to this one publisher and in the last six years, our
Elsevier expenditures increased by 151%.

Mr. White presented the same proposal to all parties
including me.  This was the  standard  proposal   access to
the electronic versions of all of their titles for 7.5% over
print costs in the first year; 9% increase in each of the
next two years with a no cancellation clause; and 10%
discount for electronic version in lieu of a print
subscription.  He stressed the value of this proposal
because we would have access to titles we didn t  currently
have (more information for the same price, in his terms) and
we would avoid the high increases caused by dollar
devaluation.  He stressed that Elsevier was taking  a risk
on currency exchange.  He talked a lot about the Ohiolink
contract and by virtue of his conversation seemed to suggest
that this was the model of choice for all.

I was not, by choice, in the meeting with the President and
Executive Vice President, but I understand the message he
was given was not much different from that which he
received from the faculty, a meeting that I facilitated.  The
faculty gave him the following points to consider:

   The symbiotic relationship which faculty have had with
          commercial publishers is breaking down due to the
          pricing policies of publishers.

   Commercial publishers seem to have forgotten that they
          do not produce the content which is sold and the
          content producers can choose to go elsewhere.

   Having access to more information (more titles) is not
          that important because if those titles were
          important to us in the first place we would be
          subscribing to the print version (note: our
          interlibrary loan records bear this out).

   It is critical that electronic serials be linked at the
          article level to indexing sources, particularly
          Current Contents or Web of Science, INSPEC,
          COMPENDEX, MEDLINE, and Biological Abstracts; an
          index which Elsevier is developing is not
          important and a waste of resources.

   The issue of currency exchange, particularly in the
          case of the dollar and the guilder is a  crock.
          (One faculty member read him the value of the
          guilder over a seven year period and noted the
          years when there should have been a negative
          increase.  It came out during this discussion that
          in essence the dollar was being used to stabilize
          the prices for all currencies meaning U.S.
          subscribers were paying for all currency
          devaluations.)

   Prices of titles are unnecessarily high.  (One faculty
          member who is an editor of a society journal which
          is priced at $230 without page charges questioned
          why a similar journal covering the same discipline
          with a similar number of annual pages would cost
          four times more.)

   Elsevier s experience with Ohiolink is but one model
          and each state has a different culture or
          tradition in university support, so what worked in
          Ohio will not work in Indiana.

   To guarantee a 9% annual price increase means that cuts
          must take place elsewhere because this amount
          exceeds general inflation, the amount that the
          University would likely receive from the state.
          The faculty as a group stated that they would
          neither ask nor support a request that such an
          increase be given priority over other needs in the
          University.  However, a proposal which had a 3%
          guarantee would be given serious consideration.
          (The faculty had heard rumors that some Ohio
          libraries were having to cancel other publications
          in order to meet the mandated Elsevier increase.)

   The next time serials were cut, it would be Elsevier
          titles because publications from
          scholarly/scientific society publishers would be
          protected.

After this meeting, my Associate Dean who is responsible for
collections, and I met with him.  I reiterated the points,
which I m pleased to say, were consistent at all levels of
responsibility in the University.  I did receive a
letter from him in which he sated that Elsevier would be
working with ISI to provide article level linking and that
he was preparing a proposal for me which takes into account
the information he learned here.  We ll see!  One other
interesting point was made   that there s no reason why
additional print subscriptions for the same title needed to
be priced at the same rate as the first copy and he would
look into better pricing.  Purdue, even after a $600,000
serials cancellation, still subscribes to over 30 duplicate
Elsevier titles.

I m sorry this was so lengthy, but I hope it was of
interest.

Emily R. Mobley
Purdue University



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