Re: FTE-based pricing

["Richard Gottlieb" <rhg2@greyhouse.com>]

John, With all respect.

l. Many/Most academic research libraries work, to greater/lesser 
extents with the Ebsco's of the world. When they are not, they 
are negotiating little- big to big deals with the larger players. 
I recognise that there are also significant numbers of "one 
offs".

But again- a publisher has x number of library subs for a given 
journal. Let's say 500 that are directly from the academic 
librarys. Consider the cost of in house staff 
contact/negotiating/ inputting and databasing pricing info - and 
then later readjusting pricing based on usage or other criteria. 
Then multiply against the number of journals that they publish. 
The overhead costs are phenomenal, and where they won't sink the 
smaller journal publisher, they certainly will require price 
increases across the board to support. Dick


From: "John McDonald" <jmcdonald@library.caltech.edu>
To:  <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu> 
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2006 1:28 PM
Subject: RE: FTE-based  pricing

> I disagree.
>
> Every academic research library in the nation already 
> negotiates nearly every single year with nearly every single 
> publisher.  If not individually then in small collectives.  Or 
> we use vendors who have to dig out pricing information from 
> publishers and match that to the relevant demographic data 
> required for the hundreds of pricing models already in place. 
> How many FTE do you have? Not including staff? Including only 
> those in particular subjects? What's your Carnegie class?  Do 
> you have a med school?  etc. and so on.
>
> Usage based pricing is closer than you think.  In fact, we have 
> a number of publishers already using it - namely Society 
> publishers where usage pricing is a positive and beneficial way 
> to distribute costs across subscribers.  There are only a few 
> issues to address before using these types of models:
>
> 1. Standard usage statistics (and a way to audit them)
>
> 2. A balance against excessive or minimal usage (for both 
> publishers and libraries)
>
> 3. A process for adjusting pricing from year to year
>
> 4. Agreement on price per use (reasonable for both publishers 
> and libraries)
>
> #1 is nearly done, although auditing of publisher statistics 
> should be performed at the local level #2 is easy to accomplish 
> in a number of ways (see Science's tiered usage bands for an 
> example) #3 is easy to do, just look at Toby's logical example 
> from the previous message #4 is the hard part
>
> Small publishers that can't collectively bargain with individual
> subscribers will adopt the pricing policies and models in use by
> big publishers.  They did it with online journal publishing and
> licensing models in the recent past.
>
> Thanks,
>
> John McDonald
> Acquisitions Librarian
> California Institute of Technology
>
> -----Original Message-----
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Gottlieb
> Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 4:19 PM
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Re: FTE-based pricing
>
> Toby's proposal is quite logical. However quite impractical. It
> calls for the publisher to negotiate, monitor and periodically
> adjust the contract terms for every institutional subscription.
> Additional staff of one to three moderately competent staffers to
> manage a single journal. Now consider that a given publisher
> might have 10-30-50, or in the case of the giants, hundreds of
> journals.All of these costs will affect pricing negatively. Won't
> happen.
>
> Dick Gottlieb
> Grey House