Disturbing spread of dyscalculia in recent publisher price lists and announcements

[<bernd-christoph.kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de>]

Dear colleagues,

according to the english Wikipedia,

"Dyscalculia is a lesser known disability, similar and 
potentially related to dyslexia and developmental dyspraxia. 
Dyscalculia occurs in people across the whole IQ range, and 
sufferers often, but not always, also have difficulties with 
time, measurement, and spatial reasoning." (...)

Potential symptoms include ...

"Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, 
sometimes even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost 
of the items in a shopping basket or balancing a checkbook."

"Poetic ability. Good visual memory for the printed word."

"May do fairly well in subjects such as science and geometry, 
which require logic rather than formulae, until a higher level 
requiring calculations is obtained."

"Poor long-term memory (retention & retrieval) of concept 
mastery."

"Difficulty with conceptualizing time and judging the passing of 
time. May be chronically late."

"Lack "big picture/ whole picture" thinking."

"Difficulty with games such as poker with more flexible rules for 
scoring."

"Difficulty in activities requiring sequential processing, from 
the physical (such as dance steps) to the abstract (reading, 
writing and signaling things in the right order). May have 
trouble even with a calculator due to difficulties in the process 
of feeding in variables."

I guess all this looks quite familiar to many of us having to 
deal with publishers on a daily / annual basis in acquisitions 
and budgeting.

Signs of serious (and serial) dyscalculia have also surfaced in 
recent attempts of publishers to answer the International 
Coalition of Library Consortia ICOLC's plea for creating 
effective pricing and renewal options for dealing with the global 
economic crisis and its impact on consortial licenses.

First SAGE Publications tried to sell us a migration to e-only by 
pledging to plant trees and promising considerable savings for 
libraries. When we checked the calculation, the "savings" 
amounted to a price increase by 15%. The publisher apologized and 
said, they made an honest mistake when calculating 2010 list 
prices. (From our scrapbook on How Publishers are (not) Helping 
Libraries in the Downturn ... this time SAGE, 
http://twtlong.com/itsbyc).

A lapse in logic surfaced with IOP Publishing, who maintained a 
price freeze for e-only compared to 2009 (actually there was no 
e-only option in 2009, and you are now offered to get e-only in 
2010 for the same money that still brought you print plus online 
in 2009). Taking into account the price differential, we see an 
increase by 5% on average. IOP Publishing also fails to take into 
account that for their european customers a price differential of 
only 5% will mean a price increase for going e-only (due to the 
higher VAT applicable).

Now comes Oxford Journals.

They tell us "... we are pleased to report that there will be no 
increase in the online only price between 2009 and 2010 for the 
majority of our journals." Hm ... 79% certainly is the majority, 
but it looks already suspicious that the percentage isn't higher. 
But if you then examine further and find out that another 25%+ of 
the journals (50+) do not follow the stated rule:

"From 2010 onwards the online only price will be the 'base' price 
for all journals we publish (rather than the print-plus-online or 
combined price). The print only price will be 110% and the 
combined price 120% of the online only price.", ...

with actual surcharges for a combined subscription up to 67% 
(print up to 53%) higher than the "base price", you really wonder 
what's going on here. Nota bene, the Oxford Journals webpage, at 
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/access_purchase/2010/pricing_policy_2010.html 
(Pricing Policy and Conditions 2010) lists only 4 exclusions to 
the 2010 Institutional Price Policy (Journal of Topology and 
three Journals of the London Mathematical Society).

Turns out that for a large part of Oxford Journals, namely all in 
the Oxford Open program (85 hybrid journals that offer authors an 
OA option on a per article basis), pricing of print is actually 
decoupled from online. In the words of OUP, from footnote 8 to 
the Oxford Journals - Institutional Price List 2010:

"2010 online-only subscription prices for journals offering the 
optional Oxford Open model have been adjusted to reflect the 
amount of open access content published in each journal in 2008 
[compared to 2007]*. Generally, the more open access content 
published in a journal, the lower the future online-only price. 
However, this picture is sometimes complicated by other factors 
such as changes in page extent, issue frequency, and exchange 
rate adjustments." [* my amendment, cf. previous price lists - 
this probably hasn't changed, as actual evidence from examples I 
have checked demonstrate.]

Such a policy has been in effect since at least 2006(07), but why 
on earth is this footnote only attached to two journals (JNCI and 
Schizophrenia) instead of all ... in the program? And why does 
OUP not highlight that their new policy - online only price as 
the base price for 'all journals we publish' - does not hold for 
this large group of titles? As the discrepancy can be massive, 
decisions based on the "general rule" (should we ask our faculty 
to dispense with print, based on potential savings?) can be 
utterly wrong. By the way, if the OA uptake for these journals 
increases, OUP lowers just the online only price, not the online 
surcharge for combined print+online subscriptions. This could be 
a welcome incentive to move away from print but it should be 
properly communicated.

OUP should clearly lay open how prices for these titles were 
actually set, depending on the development of OA uptake, 
increases in size (output) if any and other factors. (To be fair, 
spot tests have convinced me that the adjustments made accurately 
reflect the OA uptake of the journals in question; the formula 
used for 2010 was: combined rate (2010) = combined rate 
(2009)*0,95*1,2, print rate (2010) = combined rate 
(2009)*0,95*1,1, online only rate (2010) = combined rate 
(2009)*0,95*(1 - OA uptake), plus possible adjustments for 
occasional other factors, applied to all three rates. The OA 
uptake rates for 2008 varied between 0% and 30%. This is a slight 
improvement over 2007 where top OA uptake rate was 24% (for 
"Bioinformatics", same as 2008), while the average uptake in life 
sciences was 11% (SSH 2%, Med, Math 5%, avg 7%) (after Claire 
Bird: Case Study: Oxford Journals' adventures in open access, in: 
Learned Publishing 21 No. 3 (July 2008), 200-208).)

The passing reference, that the picture is sometimes complicated 
by "exchange rate adjustments" also aroused our suspicion. We 
indeed found three Oxford Open titles published in the US with 
apparent "exchange rate adjustments": The online only price for 
"Nicotine and Tobacco Research [US]" increases 15% in EUR / GBP, 
while USD price remains equal. Same with the Gerontologist 
package [US] that increases by 33% in EUR and GBP. The "adjusted 
exchange rates" are 1.0 for USD/EUR, and 1.5 for both EUR/GBP and 
USD/GBP. These are apparently the standard "company rates" used 
by OUP. For comparison, the current real exchange rate for 
EUR/GBP is around 1.2, for USD/GBP around 1.65, and 1,4 for 
USD/EUR. For titles published in GB and SG, the "company rates" 
used are 2 USD/GBP and 1.5 EUR/GBP. This amounts to "exchange 
rate profiteering" (to use the clear language of my friend Dana 
Roth from Caltech) of 10% in GBP and 40% in EUR for US based 
titles, and 20% in USD and 30% in EUR for titles published in GB 
and SG. So if anything, we would have expected "exchange rate 
adjustments" in the opposite direction.

There is another case among Oxfords OA experiments that leads you 
to doubt whether they calculated correctly, or made an "honest 
mistake", or are just trying to experiment with pricing and see 
what happens. This is "Evidence-based Complementary and 
Alternative Medicine (eCAM)". Launched 2004, Publication costs 
were to be covered by a 10 year sponsorship grant from Ishikawa 
Natural Medicine Products Research Center (INMPRC). In 2007 OUP 
announced a change in eCAM Open Access Policy: "Oxford Journals 
has been providing all eCAM papers 'Open Access' without any 
charge to authors for the first four volumes since its launch. 
This has attracted much enthusiasm, and now the journal is 
established as one of the most exciting in the field.

Due to great success in experimenting with the open access 
system, it has been decided for original articles to remain 'open 
access' without charge to authors after 2008. However, all other 
manuscripts will be subscription based." eCAM has about ca. 55% 
original research and 45% other articles (reviews, editorials, 
commentaries). For the letter, access is subscription based, but 
eCAM also joined the Oxford Open program. In 2009 OUP charged 
academic libraries GBP 200 for a combined subscription, GBP for 
Print and GBP 90 for e-only (45%), consistent with a 55% 
reduction due to the OA content (this could grow larger, if 
authors opted in to pay Oxford open charges for making reviews 
etc. open access).

However, what happened instead? For 2010 OUP charges GBP 209 for 
a combined subscription and GBP 190 for online only - the 
proportional reduction in online only price due to the part 
covered by OA subsidies has mysteriously disappeared. Ups! Nota 
bene, size (and output) has actually decreased by 13% since 2005. 
Now, as de facto all of eCAM is still open access, libraries 
could simply cancel, if anyone really bothered to subscribe so 
far. (Very likely, most got it via consortia or other package 
deals, e.g., in all of Germany, I found only one regular 
subscription to this title at academic medical libraries, at the 
central library for medicine in Cologne.)

By the way, the announced general change in the price structure 
from last year (combined price 100%, print/online 95%) actually 
means that print prices for Oxford Journals will increase by 10% 
for 2010 and combined print + online prices by 14%. And if you 
switch to e-only, in order to save money, as a european customer 
you still will see a price increase from 2009 to 2010 of 
typically 6% (due to the higher VAT applicable). (The exception 
are again the Oxford Open titles where real savings for libraries 
may be realized if you now switch from a combined subscription to 
e-only.)

>From the publisher's perspective, it certainly looks a lot 
better: 5% less from libraries switching from a combined 
subscription to e-only is more than offset by the savings in 
distribution and printing costs. And 14% more from libraries that 
still need print plus online in order to satisfy their clients or 
are required to fulfill basic archival roles that are based on 
maintaining print collections is a real bonus in these times 
where most publishers are pressed to keep increases in the lower 
single digit regime. In the case of Oxford Open titles, libraries 
that continue to subscribe to print despite the 14% price 
increase and can afford this, are effectively subsidizing the 
open access publishing side of these hybrid journals because they 
realize no savings at all from the gradual uptake of OA by 
authors.

But back to the statement on the changes in the Oxford Journals 
institutional price policy and the communication of such complex 
changes, that have far reaching consequences for the budgeting of 
libraries. Is it really too much asked to provide more 
transparency to customers, to correctly annotate price lists duly 
noting all exceptions to a stated policy, and to avoid broad 
sweeping statements that leave customers and agencies in the dark 
to find out what it really means, when they discover that a large 
part of the titles does not fit the description of a revised 
pricing policy?

Ironically, Oxford Journals just announced on 10 June 2009 that 
it has become one of the first STM publishers to achieve ISO 
9001:2008 certification for the operations side of its business. 
The press release said: "We hope our ISO 9001 certification will 
demonstrate to our authors, readers, and purchasers of our 
content that we have the proper mechanisms in place to provide a 
high quality of service to them. Through ISO 9001:2008 
certification Oxford Journals proves that key working practices 
undertaken by staff working in its Operations Group (which 
includes the Production, IT, and Customer Services departments) 
are effective in providing a consistent quality of service." Oh, 
well ... Is Dyscalculia on the radar of ISO 9001 auditors? Let's 
hope for the best.

Is there any hope for a cure? Sage advice? (hm...) ... Ex oriente 
lux? Wikipedia closes with the following paragraph:

"Treatment: Dyscalculia has no cure per se, but various treatment 
options have been explored including electro-shock therapy. 
Counselling can help, but not necessarily to a large degree. No 
therapy has been properly verified and proved to be effective. 
Some anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that a certain amount 
of mathematical proficiency can be acquired by alternative 
systems of mathematical calculation such as Eastern mathematics. 
Anecdotal evidence also suggests, in fact, that dyscalculic 
individuals might themselves pursue such systems out of need or 
interest. The condition need not be seen as a disability, there 
is nothing preventing people who suffer from dyscalculia from 
succeeding in other academic fields such as history, geography 
and other social sciences, or in artistic fields such as music or 
drama."

Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library