Re: electronic journals CCC

[Hal Cain <hal.cain@ormond.unimelb.edu.au>]

First, as to copyright and licences.

It's pretty clear that publishers are not a homogenous group when it comes
to questions of fair use and the like.

It seems pretty clear to me, though, that the whole pattern of provision
for use of published information is changing.  Whereas we had previously
only one effective model, that of publication in print where the publisher
had no further claim for recompense after sale, now we have the
possibilities of demanding further payment to reflect use after the
initial provision of the resource.  This is an attractive proposition
because it promises continued income.  Not only is it commercially
attractive, but it also reflects the user-pays principle, and correlates
with moves by groups such as creative artists to secure a claim on
financial benefits arising from their work after they dispose of it --
e.g. a share of the price paid when the work is resold, or royalties for
public exhibition, or payment to a composer for performance of her music,
or recompense for circulation of novels through public libraries.

Second, on the matter of cost recovery.

In the library environment where I work (viz. Australia) cost recovery
means recompense for the cost to the providing library of the ILL
transaction itself -- not the cost of obtaining the materials in the first
place, nor the cost of providing access to these materials (by cataloguing
the resource in which they are provided, and/or subscribing to
indexing/abstracting services), nor (for print materials) the cost of
binding/preservation and accomodation.  It means the staff time, the
machine costs, and the transmission charges.

As a matter of common practice, for transactions within Australia, most
Australian libraries follow a standard scale of charges.  There is ample
evidence that this scale falls well short of the true cost of such
transactions.

Hal Cain, Cataloguer
Joint Theological Library
Parkville, Victoria, Australia
<hal.cain@ormond.unimelb.edu.au>

S.MATTERN@KARGER.CH wrote:
> 
> >Some vendors don't seem to be able to distinguish
> >between cost recovery by a library and a commercial enterprise of an
> >information broker or information company that actually makes a profit on
> >this activity.
> 
> I guess I must be one of them.
> 
> Could you please clarify what *cost recovery* means in this case? Once you
> recover the cost of the subscription, do you stop charging an ILL fee or
> does the cost recovery have to do with the administrative costs associated
> with ILL?
> 
> Thanks for your input.
> 
> ________________________________
> Sharon Mattern Buettiker,
> Internet Services Coordinator
> 
> S. Karger AG 
> BioMedical Publishers since 1890
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