Re: On the wide disparity in publisher cost-efficiency

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

Oh, well, Emerald again ...

Emerald (formerly MCB) has received its fair share of criticism 
in the past (including some from me, back in those days of the 
newsletter of serials pricing issues), but I've learned since 
then, that Emerald is an extreme example of pricing policies that 
appear to address the bold and adventurous among us, those that 
have no fear to apply all the techniques learned on the bazaar, 
rather than the timid, who ask for the list price and turn pale 
in horror.

To put it simple and bluntly, if you actually have a few Emerald 
titles in your collection that you pay at list price instead of a 
bundle, you or your predecessors in your job probably made a 
terrible mistake, or your institution has/had too much money to 
spend. Just cancel and start anew.

For some historical reason, that eludes my comprehension 
(although I'd love to hear explanations), single title prices 
with Emerald are fantasy prices. If you actually start talking to 
Emerald (and they really have friendly and competent staff), 
you'll be surprised to learn that it can be possible to get a 
package of titles for less than the list price of the most 
expensive title(s) in it, and that you actually might be able to 
get a rather decent offer for your campus or consortium. 
(Disclosure: my perspective and experience is that of a large 
technical university with comparatively small business and social 
sciences, but I have also talked to colleagues from other 
universities.)

Essentially, you buy Emerald as a full text database (various 
sizes and collections available) and have to judge its efficiency 
on that basis (i.e. on an aggregated cost per use base), not any 
individual titles a la carte which would be terribly expensive.

With respect to transparency and investigations of publisher cost 
efficiency and value for money on the basis of various possible 
metrics: I guess this is a prime example of why Ted Bergstrom, 
Paul Courant and Preston McAfee were right to ask libraries and 
consortia to disclose the actual terms of their bundle deals 
(under a public-records request) rather to rely on list prices, 
cf. e.g. the ARL press release Elsevier Motion to Block License 
Release Denied in Open-Records Decision, 
http://www.arl.org/news/pr/elsevier-wsu-23jun09.shtml and Ted 
Bergstroms Journal Pricing page, 
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.html

I'll leave it to others who are in a better position to do this 
to possibly comment on the actual cost efficiency of Emerald 
compared to other publishers in economics on an aggregate basis, 
but my understanding is that this was also not the focus or 
intention of your actual message (to look at any particular 
publisher). I only wanted to give a little warning that 
individual title list prices have very little meaning here. (And 
please take also the bazaar analogy above with a grain of salt. 
The positive message here is: the publisher might be more 
responsive to your needs and constraints then you would have 
assumed.)

I'd also question your placative and simplistic contrasting of 
the (efficient) "mission-oriented publisher that has never 
charged more than they needed to survive" with the (inefficient) 
"highly for-profit publishers".

That's a poetic notion not one that adequately matches today's 
complex business realities for scholarly publishers, both 
for-profit and not-for-profit.

The question of cost-efficiency is a complex one, cf. for a 
starter the the JISC Report

Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: 
Exploring the costs and benefits (Jan 2009)

and the Feedback on it provided by STM and ALPSP, as discussed 
under 
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx


Best regards,
Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library


Heather Morrison schrieb:
> Libraries and librarians are continuing to cope with the impact of the
> global financial crisis, and I understand that some of us are beginning
> to wonder why our libraries are facing deep budget cuts and staff
> furloughs while a few of the largest commercial publishers are boasting
> record profits.
>
> Understandable, some are beginning to look for a better deal, and
> personally I think this is a very good thing.  However, this might be a
> good time to highlight that there is a very wide discrepancy in the
> cost-effectiveness of different types of publishers.  It it not fair,
> IMHO, to treat the mission-oriented publisher that has never charged
> more than they needed to survive, as if they were the same as the highly
> for-profit publishers.  By all means, let's look for deals - but let's
> not forget that a 3% increase to a $100 subscription is only $3, while a
> 3% increase to a $1 million subscription is $30,000 - and the $3
> increase might mean the difference to survival for the efficient
> publisher, while the for-profit would have to give up more than $30,000
> to even begin to have something resembling a revenue cut of a much
> smaller order of magnitude than what is faced by many a library.
>
> One extreme example from our own profession:
>
> As of today, the subscription list price for the for-profit Library
> Management (Emerald) is EUR 11,819 (Ulrich's).   That's $14,600 US (Bank
> of Canada currency conversion service, June 18, 2010).  Compare this
> with the MAXIMUM institutional cost for ACRL's College and Research
> Libraries at $80 US for non-member institutions outside of the US and
> Canada.  This is a difference of well over a hundred fold in
> subscription cost for these two journals, and I would argue that of the
> two, it is ACRL's College and Research Libraries that is the more
> prestigious.  I do acknowledge that single subscription costs are of
> limited applicability in the world of bundled and largely consortial
> pricing.  Also, this is an extreme example.  Cost differentials in the
> range of 4 to 10-fold appear to be much more common (that is, the cost
> of one journal on a per-article basis can be a four to 10 times as much
> for another journal of similar or every higher quality.  Imperfect
> though this example is,  it is illustrative of the wide difference in
> costs between different publishers which does not necessarily correlate
> in a positive manner with quality.
>
> The original analysis for this example is from my book, Scholarly
> Communication for Librarians, Chandos Publishing: Oxford, 2009.  The
> cost differential has increased since the time the book was written; the
> ACRL cost is stable, while the Emerald cost has risen considerably.
>
> [Disclosure:  I am co-coordinator of the ARL and ACRL Scholarly
> Communication Institute webinar series, Building Strength through
> Collaboration, however this has nothing to do with ACRL publications or
> membership].
>
> Heather Morrison, MLIS
> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com


-- 
Universitaetsbibliothek
Universitaet Stuttgart
Holzgartenstrasse 16
70550 Stuttgart

Tel. +49-(0)711-685-64731
       +49-(0)711-685-64731