Re: Confidentiality language and the netLibrary license

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

In my experience there are two rational purposes why publishers object to
the disclosure of contract provisions:

a/ when they offer significantly different terms to a library, in order to
make a sale by offering a bargain on terms they do not want to or cannot
afford to generally offer.

b/ when they pretend to be doing a/, in order to persuade each library
that it is receiving a bargain, although that is not the case. One very
large commercial publisher has, I believe, made a frequent practice of
this.

There is of course also the widespread irrational feat of telling anyone
anything about their business practices, however harmless.

There may well be areas of commerce where these are regarded as
appropriate business practices, but I think most librarians do not
consider the sale of electronic resources to libraries to be one of them.  
Since according to http://www.oclc.org/about/governance/ "OCLC is governed
by its members," who are the participating libraries, it should be
possible to correct this situation.

Although I speak only for myself, I will quote a former president of one
of my current institutional affiliations: "Open treaties openly arrived
at."

-- 
Dr. David Goodman
Princeton University Library
and
Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University

e-mail: dgoodman@princeton.edu