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

I have great respect for Tyler's opinion on copyright issues and agree with him almost 100% -- however, this is not a copyright issue and this may not be the best forum to get the best advice.

To repeat the central point in my original response -- if I, as an individual librarian, take out a subscription at the individual rate, rather than the institutional rate, and that subscription is paid for with institutional funds, and I do it with the intention of getting a subscription for the library while evading the higher institutional rate, then it seems to me that I am committing fraud.

Tyler's analysis, however, suggests that I am not behaving fraudulently as long as I do not explicitly claim to the publisher that I'm actually trying to get a subscription for the library, rather than for my personal use. (Sort of a "don't ask, don't tell" policy?)

This would certainly be good news to a great many librarians if that is the case, but I'm having trouble buying it. To use the language of Tyler's example, when I check of that "individual rate" box, am I not "expressly misrepresenting" myself as an individual, when I am, in fact, acting as an agent of the institution?

T. Scott Plutchak

Editor, Journal of the Medical Library Association

Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences University of Alabama at Birmingham

tscott[_at_]uab.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: Belvadi, Melissa [mailto:mbelvadi[_at_]maryville.edu] Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2003 3:07 PM
To: CNI-COPYRIGHT Mail List
Subject: [CNI-COPYRIGHT] Re: "Do not sell to schools" and copyright

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 Received on Fri Apr 04 2003 - 09:42:35 GMT