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RE: Calculating the Cost per Article in the Current Subscription Model
- To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>, <pmd8@cornell.edu>
- Subject: RE: Calculating the Cost per Article in the Current Subscription Model
- From: "David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>
- Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 20:24:05 EST
- Reply-to: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
- Sender: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
I'd like to mention some factors I find helpful in interpreting this data, as also noted by Heather and by Sally. 1. Phil, as I interpret footnote 4, "figures include overhead and profit"--please correct me if I'm not seing this right, but the publisher's cost including overhead and profit is the price the publisher charges=20 the library. As librarians, you and I think of that as _the_ cost, because it's our cost. (subject to my note 3) It is however _not_ the cost to the publisher. The cost to the publisher does not include profit; he can price his product to attain whatever level of profit he thinks is appropriate and possible. The cost for the publisher to produce a journal , including overhead, might be $1000, and if he prices it at $2000 then the library's cost is $2000, and the publisher makes a very good profit. . With the same $1000 cost to the publisher, he might price it at $1000 and break even, which may be all a particular non-profit publisher wants. 2. Even considering the cost to the publisher, it represents his current costs, and the price as based on that cost. It does not represent what he might be able to sell it at if he produces more efficiently, produces more cheaply, has lower overhead, or - even -- gets more subscriptions! If any of these happens, he often chooses to produce larger journals, but might choose higher profits, or lower prices. 3. I think some but not all of the library serials budget figures include some acquisitions costs, such as fees for subscription agents and postage. These will not be major components, but they do represent additional costs to the libraries. There is also library overhead, which is I think never included in these figures--not even the salaries of the serials staff. 4. The 50% you use for the percent due to scholarly journals, does this also include indexing and=20 abstracting services? I think libraries do this differently, and it may be a major component. 5. The data is changing--figures from price lists, library statistics, annual reports, and so on are generally out of date when published, but we cannot hope for better. Experience helps in knowing how to adjust them. Concluding, your data about shift to a producer-paid model assumes equal values for all of these factors under both models. I agree that it is the right way to think about it.. It is not prudent to plan on the assumption libraries could force publishers to lower overhead or decrease profits. Even if we could, that fwould apply to either model. As almost all of us recognize, the rationale for a change to OA journals is not to reduce the cost, but to improve the access. It's the economic effect of that change on individual universities that your spreadsheet shows, and it will obviously be necessary to compensate for the change in some manner. Yours, Dr. David Goodman dgoodman@liu.edu
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