Re: Wiley-Blackwell 2009 Subscription and Licensing Options

[Adam Hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

I think Paul may be understating the difference between the 
'Profit' and 'the non-Profit' publisher, and Joe Serene may have 
been overly modest.  The APS 2009 price lists show a marked 
overall reduction on the online prices for 2009. Rarely have 
for-profit publishers have reduced the charges they make to their 
online subscription services.

The APS access fees are still quite substantial. A very large 
institution will pay $24K for an annual subscription to 
everything and a small institution $11K, but the smaller 
institutions will be paying 8% less in 2009.

But I doubt that the APS is just using 'cost based' calculations 
to set its scale of prices. A small institution does not cost the 
publisher or aggregator a lot less than a large institution 
(large customers are often easier to deal with than small 
customers and the marginal cost of heavy usage of a database is 
minimal). The rationale for charging much less to a small campus 
and for modestly increasing the prices to the very large 
institution in 2009 have nothing to do with the cost of serving a 
large or a small institution. The justification for the marked 
discrepancy between large and small is either of the kind that 
Joe Esposito identifies (the perceived value of the proposition) 
or based on some intuition of 'fairness'.

But hats off to the APS: bringing the subscription price down for 
a large part of the customer base is not to be sniffed at in 
inflationary times.

Adam Hodgkin


On 7 Oct 2008, at 00:10, Paul N. Courant wrote:

> And here we have the difference between non-profits and 
> for-profits.  Joe Serene sets prices to cover costs, including 
> paying the folks who do the work.  Joe Esposito says the that 
> the market sets prices, which can't quite be entirely true, 
> because the quantity demanded of any title will depend in part 
> on the price. As long as the price is high enough to cover 
> costs, The publisher has a choice of prices. The obvious price 
> for the publisher to pick (or at least to guess at and try to 
> pick) is the profit-maximizing price, which will depend, per 
> Joe E., on the market.
>
> Paul N. Courant
> University Librarian and Dean of Libraries
> Harold T. Shapiro Professor of Public Policy
> Professor of Economics and of Information
> The University of Michigan
>
> On 10/3/08 6:31 PM, "Joe Serene" <serene@aps.org> wrote:
>
>> The American Physical Society is one such publisher; that's
>> exactly how we set prices, and have for many years.  We do our
>> best (not always as successfully as we would like) to estimate
>> our expenses over a year in advance, and then set our prices to
>> cover these estimated expenses plus a small fixed percentage
>> return.  The results for 2009 can be found at
>> http://librarians.aps.org/pressrelease2009pricing.pdf .
>>
>> We don't sell print-only subscriptions.  We regard print as an
>> optional add-on to the primary online subscriptions, and we
>> ascribe to the online journals all production costs except those
>> specific to print. We then try to set the additional charges for
>> print to cover just these specific print expenses.  This of
>> course means that the cost of the print add-ons will grow as the
>> number of print subscribers decreases.
>>
>> Joe Serene
>> Treasurer/Publisher
>> American Physical Society