Document Delivery concerns

Date: Fri, 02 Jun 1995 16:05:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: LIB_STANKUS@HCACAD.HOLYCROSS.EDU
Subject: Document Delivery Prices, Print Journal Prices, Library Strategy

Marty Courtois (U.Tenn.Biol.Scis.Librn.) asks "how long will it take
for commercial document suppliers to employ some the pricing policies
that led to massive journal cancellations?" A number of interesting replies
have come in from Chad Buckley (Sci.Librn.,Illinois State U.), C.Lee
Jones (President, Linda Hall Library), and Chuck Huber (U.Cal. at Santa
Barbara). The following are some observations from my modest basis of
research and experience, as well as from extended, off-the-record
discussions on a regular basis with publishers' reps.

1. Those who speculate that publishers are not yet making any real
money on royalties from third-party document suppliers are generally
right. The overhead charged by not-for-profit suppliers like the Copyright
Clerance Center in the form of the percentage of the fee that CCC gets
to keep is reportedly too high, and/or, the publishers feel that the
fee at the bottom of the page is too low in the first place. (Admittedly
CCC is not a document supplier, but a clearinghouse for copy-beyond-
"fair-use." Expect some upward adjustment in terms of basic fee.
THe money supplied by commercial document delivery is also regarded as
too low to make up for the loss, but at least the commerical document
delivery services buy their journals in the first place, sometimes in
multiple copy. I do not have any info on how CARL is paying or not
paying to publishers, or on any perceived profitability. Despite all
this apparent gloom, very few publishers are taking the route that
only they, the publisher, will, in the future, be able to supply
documents. My sense is that they are not ready to become exclusive
suppliers just yet, and this reluctance is good for libraries. The
real threat is that publishers will vend their documents (in print
or through electronic downloading of files) directly to the faculty
clientele, by-passing the library altogether. Right now, the publishers
are still dependent on the up-front money that library subscriptions
generate. Indeed, this is more true for the not-for-prfit sector
than of the for-profit sector, and more true for US publishers
than for Europublishers. For this reason, they are enduring
what one rep, who was paraphrasing Hamlet, called: "the slings
and arrows of visits to angry periodicals librarians." But
the cash-rich Euro-for-profits are looking at trend lines, and
will, if the cancellectomy trend continues, probably bypass
the libraries altogether and vend via the Internet, or something
like it. The Euro-for-profits probably have sufficient war-chests
to manage the transition from dependency on libraries to dependency
on faculty. The uncertainty principles operating are the smoothness
of handling big (but declining) library checks (easy to process)
versus handling faculty account checks (many checks in much smaller
amounts, but less frightful in these days of electronic accounting
and funds transfers.) In essence, journal publishers may well
choose to go the reimbursement route of chemical and equipment
suppliers. While many librarians would say "good riddance,"
I personally feel that the library community as a whole will be losing
a political and economic alliance with the financially most powerful
segment of the faculty if this "bypass" comes to pass.

2. There is some hope that the university press segment of the
industry will wake up, and once again compete with the for-profit
segment. I surveyed this situation in 1989. In a chapter entitled
"The Producer of the Article as Its Distributor: The Competitive Status
and Prospects of the University Sector of U.S. Science Journal Publishing,"
I traced the sorry abandonment of science journal publishing by US
schools, and its current dominance (if you want to call such a small
market share "dominance') by a handful of presses: Chicago, JOhns Hopkins,
Rockefeller, MIT, and Yale. There were actuallymore scientific publications
coming out of university presses before WWII than after, for a variety
of reasons. Those reasons included part-time management, management
by nonscientists, ability of given depts. on campuses to make
their own deals with for-profit presses by-passing the local press,
lack of underwriting of journal by campus administration during lean times,
etc. Indeed, today, I can safely say that there are still more little
poetry mags from college presses than science journals, even though
college spending and grantswinning in the colleges than ever.
However, there are good signs: Stanford is helping with the Internet
version of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, MIT Press is looking good
in the Neurosciences and relate areas, Chicago has withstood the outrage of
some librarians who short-sightedly criticized a  price increase on one
of their human genetics journals when the alternatives were some still
much pricier for-profits.

3. There is some hope in that the US for-profit segment is not
so endangered as it was in the late 80's. (Recall that the advantage
of the US for-profit segment for libraries includes a lack of wild
exchange rate inflation.) While Academic is a part of a conglomerate,
at least it is not part of Elsevier. (Maxwell of Pergamon tried to
take it over and was valiantly fought off before he sold Pergamon
to Elsevier and died under mysterious circumstances, with his sons
left behind to face indictment for financial improprieties.) Wiley
and Plenum have also done well, although Plenum"s Consultant's Bureau
must be wondering how it will deal with those Soviet translation titles
that are now going unpredictably independent. Two firms, May Ann Liebert
and Cell Press, are firmly ensconced as major players in biomedicine.
While none of these for-profits are giving their material away, they still
represent better values than they might have if they had been sold
off to the Euro's.

4. Some of the Euro-not-for-profit's are also looking good. I am
impressed with Oxford Univ. Press' ability to swallow up a for-profit
press, IRL, without major gouging of libraries afterwards. The
endowed British Press, the Company of Biologists, has substantially
improved its products, without rising to the price levels of their
Euro-for-profit competition. THe Institute of Physics, the British
counterpart of the American Institute of Physics, did a reverse
revolution, and broke away from its American colonies, and has
had rather good success, even as it eliminated its American middle-man,
(It sold in the US via the AIP). Its savings have been partly passed
on through price increases more moderate than they would otherwise have to have
been.

5. Yes, even the bogey-men of Euro-for-profits, have fielded a
relatively affordable line of review journals, that many of my
faculty prefer to a subscription to one of their more expensive
journals. I will glady trade off something like Biochimica et Biophysica
Acta for Trends in Biochemical Sciences, and the like. Elsevier's
breaking apart of Brain Research into manageable sections that are
separately subscribable is a useful trend that involves setttling
for less up-front money from libraries, without entirely by-passing
them. (Of course, I am using Elsevier as an example of a Euro-for-profit
at least partly because, they, unlike some other publishers of whom
I will not speak, are classy enough to take some criticism without
a lawsuit resulting.)

In summary:

Prices for doc-delivery will go up, but paying for them if you
absolutely had to cancel, is better than being by-passed.

Some of the segments of the publishing industry that are more favorable to
libraries are doing better, and ought to be preferentially supported.

Even some Euro-for-profits are developing somewhat more affordable
library products.

At Your Service,

Tony Stankus, Science Librarian, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA