RE: [cni] [CNI-COPYRIGHT] Re: "Do not sell to schools" and copyright

On Saturday, March 29, 2003 9:07 PM, Belvadi, Melissa [SMTP:mbelvadi[_at_]maryville.edu] wrote:
> Tyler is saying exactly what I want to hear, which makes me cautious.
>
> So I'd like to be more specific about my interest in this thread.
>
> Many readers of this list may not be aware that academic libraries are
> routinely charged an "institutional subscription price" for scholarly
> journals that is as much as 10 times the "individual subscription price"
> (e.g. $70/year for a professor but $700/year for his/her library).
>
> Libraries tend to purchase periodicals through a third company (which we
> call a "jobber", like EBSCO or SWETS) that handles not only our
> payment/renewal paperwork but also handles for us the various "claims"
> we
> need to file for issues that don't arrive.
>
> I have generally considered that in the absence of an explicit clause
> in the
> journal subscription terms (like the Journal of the American Chemical
> Society one I mentioned in my earlier posting), that the only reason
> libraries have put up with this outrageous price discrimination is
> because
> the labor cost to us of processing so many serials (and claims) directly
> with publishers is actually higher for most libraries with hundreds or
> even
> thousands of subscriptions than just paying the institutional price
> plus the
> jobber's fees.
>
> But in the last 10-15 years, some for-profit publishers of scholarly
> journals have gotten, well to speak subjectively, greedy, and increased
> institutional pricing far above the inflation rate, year after year
> after
> year, causing libraries with modest-to-none budget increases to face a
> genuine crisis. (Everyone on this list knows already about the monopoly
> pricing power inherent in copyright law; that power exists to the hilt
> in
> the domain of scholarly publishing.)
>
> I thought that in theory and in the absence of an explicit publisher
> restriction, libraries could, if they were willing to do all that extra
> work
> title by title, get individual subscriptions in the names of, for
> instance,
> individual librarians, and pay just the individual price. With prices so
> high in the last few years, this might finally have become a
> cost-effective
> option for some titles.
>
> Am I wrong? Is there actually a serious legal ground (rather than
> administrative cost one) behind why libraries do NOT just pay for their
> subscriptions individually to their librarians?
>
> Thanks for any advice, even IANAL advice!
>
> Melissa Belvadi
>
>

With the caveat that the economics of scholarly publishing are evolving, it's just as valid to consider the practice as discounting in favour of individuals as price discrimination against institutions. Institutional subscriptions are the bread-and-butter of scholarly publishing, not the jam. Generally a scholarly publisher will try to recoup the production costs (primarily the editorial etc. costs) from institutional sales. Once the up-front costs have been covered, it is then feasible to sell individual subscriptions - for example to society members - at or just above run-of-press cost. If there were to be unitary pricing, with both individuals and institutions paying the same rate, that unitary price would tend to be much closer to the institutional rate, on average, than the individual rate. Newly-launched journals typically take several years to break even; in the first few years, most of the subscriptions are at the individual rate but over time they are converted (at the request of faculty) to institutional ones, at which time the journal breaks even.

But, as I said, the economics are evolving under pressure from technology, declining library budgets, increasing numbers of papers being published etc. The real monopoly power in scholarly publishing doesn't come from the copyright in the published papers, but from the ownership of the most respected journal "brands" in each discipline.  Edward Barrow
New Media Copyright Consultant
http://www.copyweb.co.uk/
***Important: see http://www.copyweb.co.uk/email.htm for information about the legal status of this email *** Received on Fri Apr 04 2003 - 09:42:35 GMT