Re: Price discrimination for academic subscriptions (discussion)

["Sally Morris" <sec-gen@alpsp.org>]

Setting aside for one moment the alleged 'exorbitant profits' of some
publishers, I hope we all understand that if we want publishers to go on
publishing, they have not only to cover their costs (including overheads)
but also to make a sufficient surplus to allow for reinvestment and to
justify their existence to their owner (be that a learned society or
commercial shareholders).  To do that, someone has to pay - either from
the supply side (authors, their institutions, or their research funders)
or from the customer side (individual consumers, or their libraries).  
Publishers are trying to find fairer ways to allocate those costs between
the different payers, which seems to me entirely laudable - as has been
pointed out in this discussion, a print subscription was always a very
crude proxy for either potential or actual use.

The PALS group (a UK collaboration between publishers and universities)
recently commissioned a piece of research on alternative charging models
for information;  we hope to make the final report available very soon at
www.palsgroup.org.uk

Sally Morris, Secretary-General
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK

Phone:  01903 871686 Fax:  01903 871457 E-mail:  sec-gen@alpsp.org
ALPSP Website  http://www.alpsp.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Davis" <pmd8@cornell.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 11:05 PM
Subject: RE: Price discrimination for academic subscriptions (discussion)

> Academia has always been an elitist market (this is why many parents in
> the United States are willing to pay $30-$40K per year to send their
> children to the most prestigious schools).  Even in socialized countries,
> where their governments treat higher education as a public good and
> tuition is either free or highly subsidized, schools are far from
> homogeneous.  These schools are "elitist" in the because they can attract
> the most productive researchers, the majority of the research grants, the
> brightest students, and build world-class libraries.  Libraries promote
> themselves based on their number of books, periodical subscriptions, and
> rare documents.
>
> Price discrimination, where large institutions pay more money for a
> subscription than a smaller/poorer/developing country library is both a
> good and a bad thing -- depending on who you ask.  For large institutions,
> the effect may be a massive reduction in the diversity of resources
> available to their communities.  In essence, price discrimination seems to
> logically lead to homogeneity of library collections.
>
> This leads me to my question:  will academia as a whole benefit more in a
> fixed price market, or a price discriminatory market?  A market that
> involves price discrimination -- in theory -- is supposed to work more
> efficiently than a fixed price market.  Secondly, what would be the
> effects of homogenizing the holdings of the academic libraries?  I realize
> again that I'm posing some questions that may not be completely
> answerable, but will pose these anyway for discussion.
>
> --Phil Davis