[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: FTE-based pricing

John, With all respect.

l. Many/Most academic research libraries work, to greater/lesser extents with the Ebsco's of the world. When they are not, they are negotiating little- big to big deals with the larger players. I recognise that there are also significant numbers of "one offs".

But again- a publisher has x number of library subs for a given journal. Let's say 500 that are directly from the academic librarys. Consider the cost of in house staff contact/negotiating/ inputting and databasing pricing info - and then later readjusting pricing based on usage or other criteria. Then multiply against the number of journals that they publish. The overhead costs are phenomenal, and where they won't sink the smaller journal publisher, they certainly will require price increases across the board to support. Dick


From: "John McDonald" <jmcdonald@library.caltech.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu> Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2006 1:28 PM
Subject: RE: FTE-based pricing

I disagree.

Every academic research library in the nation already negotiates nearly every single year with nearly every single publisher. If not individually then in small collectives. Or we use vendors who have to dig out pricing information from publishers and match that to the relevant demographic data required for the hundreds of pricing models already in place. How many FTE do you have? Not including staff? Including only those in particular subjects? What's your Carnegie class? Do you have a med school? etc. and so on.

Usage based pricing is closer than you think. In fact, we have a number of publishers already using it - namely Society publishers where usage pricing is a positive and beneficial way to distribute costs across subscribers. There are only a few issues to address before using these types of models:

1. Standard usage statistics (and a way to audit them)

2. A balance against excessive or minimal usage (for both publishers and libraries)

3. A process for adjusting pricing from year to year

4. Agreement on price per use (reasonable for both publishers and libraries)

#1 is nearly done, although auditing of publisher statistics should be performed at the local level #2 is easy to accomplish in a number of ways (see Science's tiered usage bands for an example) #3 is easy to do, just look at Toby's logical example from the previous message #4 is the hard part

Small publishers that can't collectively bargain with individual
subscribers will adopt the pricing policies and models in use by
big publishers. They did it with online journal publishing and
licensing models in the recent past.

Thanks,

John McDonald
Acquisitions Librarian
California Institute of Technology

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Gottlieb
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 4:19 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: FTE-based pricing

Toby's proposal is quite logical. However quite impractical. It
calls for the publisher to negotiate, monitor and periodically
adjust the contract terms for every institutional subscription.
Additional staff of one to three moderately competent staffers to
manage a single journal. Now consider that a given publisher
might have 10-30-50, or in the case of the giants, hundreds of
journals.All of these costs will affect pricing negatively. Won't
happen.

Dick Gottlieb
Grey House