RE: Comparing Institutional Membership to Per-Article Payment

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

If it had not been obvious before, these exchanges demonstrate that there
is no payment scheme that is fair to all libraries.

Discussing it in the context of particular journals and particular
libraries is particularly futile: the accidents of particular programs
will make some journals more costly to Cornell than to Yale, and some the
other way round.  This entire ingenious thread has been directed to
solving a problem that cannot be solved.

If authors publish as much�as they do in as expensive a fashion as they
do, clearly the cost to the system (excluding handling charges) will be
the same. There cannot be any way of saving significant net money except
to publish in a radically less expensive fashion.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu