237.2 JOURNAL OF MAMMOLOGY PRICE INCREASE, Scott Piepenburg
237.3 ASM JOURNAL PRICES FOR 2000, Frank Norman
237.4 FAIR PRICING FOR PRINT PLUS ELECTRONIC, David
Goodman
237.1 A COMMITMENT TO ELECTRONIC ARCHIVING
Press release from Elsevier Science dated October 29, 1999
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS and NEW YORK, NY, USA -- Elsevier Science announces its new policy on permanent archiving of electronic journals. Elsevier will maintain the journals offered through ScienceDirect(r), its host service, in perpetuity. The archives will be migrated, as the technology for storage, display or access changes, and an internal production archive separate from the ScienceDirect distribution platform will ensure redundancy and the ability to recreate the files in case of disaster.
The present ScienceDirect server holds over 700,000 articles from Elsevier Science journals and expands at a rate of 25,000 articles per month. The current format standards are SGML and PDF, and most files are retained in both formats.
Elsevier Science understands the importance to its library customers of providing a secure electronic archive in the transition from paper to electronic. Therefore, the company also makes the commitment that, in the unlikely future event that Elsevier Science (or ScienceDirect itself) should be unable to meet this responsibility, the archive will be turned over to one or more depositories chosen jointly by the publisher and an independent board of library advisors.
In addition, the company is in active discussions with librarians and other parties about additional ways to achieve the level of assurance that librarians need with respect to long-term access to electronic journals.
Derk Haank, Chief Executive, Elsevier Science, indicates, "Libraries have a long tradition of building an archive of the published record and they do not want to endanger that in the move to the electronic medium. We are keenly aware of our responsibility to assure both our subscribers and authors that the journal literature be available and accessible indefinitely."
Elsevier Science is the world's largest publisher of scientific, technical and medical journals. ScienceDirect, a unit of Elsevier Science, is the world's most comprehensive full-text scientific database and offers electronic access to more than 1,000 journals. At its core, ScienceDirect includes journals from Elsevier Science as well as other leading scientific publishers and an expanding suite of secondary databases. Elsevier Science is part of Reed Elsevier plc, a leading provider of information to the scientific, legal and business communities.
For further information about Elsevier Science's policy on electronic archiving, contact Karen Hunter (khunter@Elsevier.com).
237.2 JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY PRICE INCREASE
Scott Piepenburg, District Cataloger/System Administrator, Dallas Public
Schools, spiepenb@pigeon.dallas.isd.tenet.edu
I found the press release from Journal of Mammalogy interesting. While we don't subscribe to this particular journal, some information in the release bears closer examination.
There is the line in the 5th paragraph that states "However, 67% of similar journals cost more than the Journal of Mammalogy even with the higher subscription rate." and also the 4th paragraph "...must bring the price in line with current market standards."
Maybe I'm misreading this, but it sounds like they are raising their prices because they are losing money on it. Fine, that's a reasonable business decision, but to price it "according to what the market is charging" is a bit of a reach. It sounds like how much it costs to produce, then calculating a reasonable profit was not the methodology used, but "what is everyone else charging" was looked at, then priced accordingly.
This sounds like a bank charging you for a service, not because it costs them anything to produce, but because everyone else is doing it.
I may be wrong in my interpretation of this, if so, please let me know, but it doesn't seem like a very reasonable way to justify the new price.
237.3 ASM JOURNAL PRICES FOR 2000
Frank Norman, National Institute for Medical Research, fnorman@nimr.ac.uk
I know we should not be surprised by journal price increases, but it is still surprising when a learned society puts its prices up by unreasonable amounts. The American Society of Microbiology seem to have it in for library budgets this year. Some sample institutional subscription prices (US):
For print only (1999 price ==> 2000 price):
Molecular & Cellular Biology. $450 ==> $515
Journal of Virology. $482 ==> $772
Journal of Bacteriology. $448 ==> $550
Microbiol & Molec Biol Reviews. $151 ==> $320
J Clin Microbiol. $312 ==> $386
A library taking all 10 ASM print titles will be paying 40% extra in 2000, an increase from $3325 to $4671.
When it comes to online subscriptions the picture is worse. Whereas in 1999 there were price reductions if you subscribed to both print and online versions, for 2000 no reduction applies. A library taking all 10 ASM titles in print plus online will be paying 94% to 100% extra (depending on institution size).
And for this princely sum we will no longer be able to access pdf versions of articles, only the html versions.
I think ASM deserve this year's NSPI price for poor value-for-money.
237.4 FAIR PRICING FOR PRINT PLUS ELECTRONIC
David Goodman, Biology Librarian, Princeton University, dgoodman@Princeton.edu
Three non-profit publishers of key biology journals will be charging those librarians who want both the print and electronic versions of their journals in 2000 the sum of the print and the electronic prices:
· Rockefeller University Press (publisher of J. of cell biology, J. of experimental medicine, and J. of general physiology).
· American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (publisher of Journal of biological chemistry).
ASBMB has been doing this for some time; RUP previously charged only a 15% premium; ASM last year would not issue campus licenses at all, but would only license for use within the actual library.
I fail to see how these prices can be justified. Prices are normally based on the production costs, the value, or the overall social utility, the competition, or on what the traffic will bear.
The production of print and online versions of a journal are not independent; estimates of the common costs from the publishers involved are on the order of 75%. In order to have some actual numbers, since each of them has a lower price for online only than for print only, if we approximate that the cost of the online only distribution is 1/3 the common cost and of the print only is 1/2 of the common cost, then simple arithmetic gives a relative price ratio of online:print:combination ration of 100:112:137. Note that neither the absolute nor the relative values of the actual costs are relevant: if there is any common cost at all in the preparation and editing of the material, the publisher's cost for the combination is always less than the sum of its separate costs.
Most of us would be prepared to assume that the value of an online journal to the user community is greater than the corresponding print journal. A considerable part of the value, though, is that of getting the journal locally at all in any format -- the value for the use of the copyright. The same arithmetic holds. Regardless of whatever value is placed upon the print and on the online, if the copyright is worth anything at all, then the value of the combination is less than the sum of the two.
I think it is generally held that the social value of a journal is its availability to users. Unless the users of the print and the online form entirely separate groups, again the same arithmetic holds.
Very few online journals are priced on this basis. It would hardly make sense except for the top journals, as no one at all would even consider paying such combination prices for anything else; most of the equivalently prestigious titles, though, are not priced on this basis.
Publishers may assume that major libraries will automatically get both versions, and thus provide them revenues in excess of the costs. This may be rational for a few libraries, for a few of the titles. Since it wouldn't be for most, perhaps they assume librarians are irresponsible enough to get them anyway. I don't think they're right, but I admit I'm not quite sure.
There is another possibility: the prices are being set to discourage print. I think print should in many cases be discouraged, but not necessarily for these titles. User preferences vary. I suggest that we can no longer afford a dual publication system for the less important journals, and that it may be necessary to compel readers of relatively less used material to accept electronic even if they would prefer otherwise. For the most important few titles in each field, I suggest that we should try to also accommodate those who prefer conventional formats. But in biomedicine these publishers are the ones publishing just these titles for which it would be the most rational to preserve the dual formats if it could be done at a reasonable expense, and which have sufficient subscribers to pay for it.
The most frequently mentioned reason for continuing print versions is archiving. To me, this is not necessarily a long-term consideration, as the technology and the organization of archiving electric formats is in my opinion a solvable problem. But many disagree, and in any case one can hardly be confident about it quite yet. A library which takes archiving seriously might still need the paper for at least a little while longer; but at double the cost, for each title they archive there must be a title they cannot get at all. Many conservative libraries will do the exact opposite of what the publishers intend, and get the print version only.
What reasons do the publishers give? All three lay great stress upon the usefulness of their titles, and on their high production and development costs. They are indeed among the most valuable titles, and along with other well-produced journals undoubtedly have high costs. (They also have high numbers of subscribers, both personal and institutional.) All this does affect the price and the value, but the arithmetic about the combination still holds. As for a specific justification of the combination pricing: The ASBMB has told me explicitly that "we tried and are continuing to try to discourage print." The ASM says "our reasoning is a bit of both. We must begin to recover the costs of our investment [and discourage print]." RUP thinks no library will have difficulty paying both, because they "could simply drop some of its duplicate print subscriptions..." (In reality, most but by no means all of the institutions with separate medical libraries have duplicates of some of the RUP titles; hardly anyone else does.) I think I am giving the arguments fairly, and I will forward copies of the publishers' entire letters on request.
I consider the actions of these publishers a shame, and a defeat for the cause of a reasonable transition to electronic journals.
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