RE: Price discrimination for academic subscriptions (discussion)

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> This leads me to my question:  will academia as a whole benefit more in a
> fixed price market, or a price discriminatory market?

Unfortunately this, in turn, begs an important question of its own: How
can we know whether "academia as a whole" is benefiting?  Suppose the
whole academic publishing marketplace adopts a pricing structure that
hurts small colleges, but greatly benefits large research universities?  
Has "academia as a whole" been helped or hurt in that case?  How about a
pricing structure that reverses that effect, making it possible for small
and poorly-funded institutions to buy all kinds of great stuff, but
leaving large institutions unable to buy the same stuff?  How do you
evaluate the effect on "academia as a whole" in that case?

> I realize
> again that I'm posing some questions that may not be completely
> answerable, but will pose these anyway for discussion.

I think the problem with these questions isn't so much that they're
unanswerable in any absolute sense, but that they're unanswerable in the
form that you're posing them.

-------------
Rick Anderson
Director of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu