RE: taking out the volume increase as factor

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

A third question, and a even more important one, is whether there is any
truly suitable alternative.  It seems clear that there are at least
conceivable alternatives:  operations like arXiv are very inexpensive.
However, whether they are fully suitable as the sole medium for science
communication as a whole remains open to debate. If they need to be
enriched in some fashion, this opens the question of how much such
enrichment would cost. (For this, see the continuing debate on PLoS.) It
also raises the secondary question of what sort of organization is best
suited to do the enrichment.
 
I, like the rest of us, have definite opinions on these questions.  By
necessity, my opinions are based on extremely limited data, and change as
additional implications of the different possible pathways become
apparent, and as additional data is gathered in minute increments.In such
a situation what is needed is experimentation--which might be better
worded as trial and error or even as market competition.
 
David Goodman Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU and,
formerly, Princeton University Library

-----Original Message----- 
From: Rick Anderson [mailto:rickand@unr.edu] 
Sent: Sat 11/22/2003 12:40 AM 
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu 
Subject: RE: taking out the volume increase as factor 
	
> I guess we all want to know, did they or didn't they. If they did why are
> prices still up 2 to 3 times inflation??
	
I think general inflation figures are a red herring.  General inflation is
an average, and that means that inflation is higher in some industries
than in others.  If general inflation is, say, 3%, that doesn't
necessarily mean that 5% inflation in the widget market is unreasonable.
	
To me, this means that the relation between Elsevier's price increases and
general inflation is a poor indicator of reasonableness, and the real
question is whether Elsevier's price increases are reasonable.  The next
real question is whether, reasonable or not, their price increases are
supportable in the long run.  We can argue about whether 6.5% is
reasonable; there's no arguing, however, with the simple fact that if you
start with a high price and compound it at an annual rate of 6.5% you will
quickly end up with a price that no one can afford to pay.  Elsevier is
seeing the consequences already at Cornell and elsewhere.

Rick Anderson
rickand@unr.edu