RE: Price discrimination for academic subscriptions (discussion)

[martin@skmassociates.net]

It seems to me that if the largest (and presumably wealthiest) research
libraries cannot afford to buy "core" journals any longer [see excerpt
from posting, below], that those journals have priced themselves out of
the market and can no longer be considered "core."

These extremely expensive publishers are pushing for every last cent they
can squeeze, assuming that librarians will continue to the last to hang
onto the "core."  At some point, that paradigm has to give way.  As so
many have been saying, the economics will be the ultimate driving factor.

Sue Martin


On Sun, 7 Sep 2003 15:24:26 -0400 (EDT), Ann Okerson wrote:
......

> There are one or two early signs that usage based pricing could be very
> hard on research intensive universities, even as (perhaps) it will be
> neutral or beneficial for small schools or developing countries (see the
> many for-free offerings available for the latter at:  
> <http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/develop.shtml>.
> 
> For example, just last week, one particularly important scientific
> publisher wrote that he/it is facing advertising revenue loss.  This
> publisher notified its largest customers that price for our group will
> be related to usage *and* in those cases the prices are increasing by a
> whopping amount (doubling or more in our case).  Someone has cynically
> suggested that the solution for us is to hide those ejournals and make
> sure that as few users as possible find them.  Yet if the biggest users,
> i.e., research-intensive schools, cannot afford to purchase some core
> titles, those titles do face a good chance of withering and becoming
> far less core.
> 
> When that happens, no one wins.
> 
> Ann Okerson/Yale Library
> ann.okerson@yale.edu