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

What is being overlooked in this discussion about the difference in personal and institutional subscription prices is the fact that the institutional subscription price is based on the concept of a "collective" subscription for a library community. Whether you agree with the pricing structure or not, these contractual arrangements acknowledge that the publications will be used by multiple individuals for a variety of purposes.

The good news is that the institutional pricing arrangements provide additional support for "fair use" practices in libraries of not-for-profit institutions. In my opinion, the payment of institutional subscription prices further justifies the placement of journal articles on both print and electronic reserves. It puzzles me why academic librarians pay royalties to place articles on reserve when they have already implicitly contracted with publishers for these very uses. By the way, there is no law that states that materials can be placed on reserve for only one semester. The only reference to a one term limitation is in the legislative history that incorporates the "Guidelines for Classroom Copying" that were never intended to apply to libraries.
I recommend that all librarians review the comments of Professor L. Ray Patterson in his interview with Carrie Russell, copyright specialist for the American Library Association, which are available at http://copyright.ala.org/pattersonq&a.html .

The moral to the story is that libraries should never consider placing individual subscriptions in the library collection. This would definitely constitute fraud and vitiate any "fair use" rationale.

In regard to the comments about institutional pricing and subscription agencies, jobbers have nothing to with journal prices. They make their money by creating economies of scale and charging a "service charge" for their services (payments, claims, replacement issues, etc.).

Michael G. Webster
Eastern Oregon University

"Lloyd A.Davidson" wrote:

> At 05:30 PM 4/3/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>
> >Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 15:06:54 -0600
> >Subject: [CNI-COPYRIGHT] Re: "Do not sell to schools" and copyright
> >From: "Belvadi, Melissa" <mbelvadi[_at_]maryville.edu>
> >
> ><snip>
> >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
>
> Contracts for individual subscribers and for libraries are, in fact,
> expressly written to forbid individual subscriptions to be used to supply
> libraries or other institutions with copies in lieu of a library
> subscription. As long as a library has a subscription, however, it is OK
> to replace a worn or torn library copy of a journal with one from an
> individual's collection. It is also OK to replace missing copies with
> donations from individuals.
> Recently a company began purchasing journals at individual subscriber
> prices and then reselling these journals to libraries at institutional
> prices. This was quickly stopped by publishers and the company went out of
> business. They could have faced criminal charges, but I don't believe
> publishers pushed for this.
> The rationale for the difference between individual and institutional
> prices is that an institutional subscription may erode the journal's
> individual subscriber base. This is an even more threatening possibility
> when subscriptions of journals published in digital format are distributed
> campus-wide since this makes the journal more conveniently available than
> simply having one paper copy in the library.
> It is true that many publishers price institutional subscriptions
> unfairly high relative to prices offered to individual subscribers, but
> with virtually all scientific, technical and medical journals switching to
> digital formats, this issue is only going to become more important to
> publishers over the next few years. Unless publishers can come up with
> some reasonable solutions to this quandary, it is quite possible that the
> age of the academic individual subscriber might be at an end. Of course,
> some journals are not marketed to individuals at all (e.g. Brain Research
> at $18,000+ per annum) but journals like Cell, Science and Nature are
> facing a serious dilemma about how to protect their subscriber base, upon
> which their advertising revenue depends.
>
> Lloyd
>
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Received on Sat Apr 05 2003 - 04:44:23 GMT