RE: Price discrimination for academic subscriptions (discussion)

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

This affects even the largest institutions, which will also have
peripheral programs. One might even say that the larger the institution,
the more programs that are not central to the organization and which
receive less than adequate library support.  This is parallel to, and
confirmed by, the extremely high interlibrary loan borrowing of the large
instittions.

The needs of students and researchers are similar everywhere, and reform
or replacement of the scholarly publication system must be done so as to
benefit all scholars, both in their roles as library users and as authors.

Some recent proposals seem designed to serve only those at the major
institutions, or with large grants. Libraries should work for solutions
that will benefit all schools, not just those most like themselves.

Dr. David Goodman
Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU
formerly, Princeton University Library

-----Original Message-----
From:	Hamaker, Chuck [mailto:cahamake@email.uncc.edu]
Sent:	Thu 9/4/2003 6:16 PM
To:	'liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu'
Subject: RE: Price discrimination for academic subscriptions (discussion)

The current journals system genrally forces smaller research
establishments, or individual faculty needs to have higher per use costs
than the larger institutions with many faculty in the same area.

A faculty member in oceanography at a small institution needs access to
the same core literatures as a faculty member at a large dedicated
facility.  A few individuals in a research area at an institution will
have much much higher per use costs than individuals where there are
larger numbers of faculty in the area.

We've experienced this quite clearly at UNC Charlotte.

This is common sense, but is an area publishers and libraries have
generally ignored, though the attempts at sliding scales by FTE's are a
very crude attempt. They don't really address the issue of quality =
support for research at institutions without major programs that still
need the same core literatures as larger programs.

Chuck Hamaker