Actually, it's more like Round II of that earlier problem. The Big Deal which is at the center of the debates around Elsevier (i.e. they make libraries buy a bunch of journals they don't need) was mean to mitigate the problem as it existed in the early to mid 1990s
http://www.infotoday.com/it/sep11/The-Big-Deal-Not-Price-But-Cost.shtml The lie this perpetuates for the publishers is that there is a lot of savings this way on an article to article basis. While it is technically true, it is the publishers setting the price for both the article AND the subscription so it's not like there's some bulk discount per se. e.g. http://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_779ca6a6-2839-11e1-bf49-001a4bcf6878.html [the rest of this post is an excerpt from this linked article, about Purdue's renewal of their contract with Elsevier in Dec.] Purdue signed another one-year contract with a publishing company that allows access to journal articles necessary for research for $2.9 million, after being threatened to be cut off in January if the contract was not signed by the end of the month. Elsevier is one of the largest publishing companies. Purdue uses this company so its faculty and researchers may publish their work in world-renown journals and be able to access the articles later. This is used mostly for scientific and engineering articles. Trustee Bruce White described the way the company is charging and raising rates as "truly a monopolistic operation." "What do you think would happen to usage?" White asked. "Because it's really a question of how fast people need the information if they have to pay for it." According to James Mullins, dean of libraries, who works on the contracts with publishing companies, without paying the membership fees to Elsevier, the cost, would be much more to download Purdue faculty and researcher-generated content. "It would turn about to be about $37 million per year," Mullins said. As one Trustee noted, this would turn out to be about $3 for each download of an article. On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 14:36, Chuck Grimes <[email protected]> wrote: > > A lot of background on Elsevier v. Academia is summarized here: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier > > This problem as been in and out since I can't remember. Probably the > mid-nineties when UCB Life Sciences library started complaining about the > subscription costs... > > CG > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
