RE: Microsoft's Currency Converter and the Emerald Sixpack

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Ok, so that's about US $1,643 per issue of about 100 pages? Or 
$16.43 per page? Heckuva price. I"d be interested in knowing if 
any libraries reading this are print subscribers. I have access 
to it as a "package" subscription to Emerald journals online.

Given that it looks like its part of the package deal from 
emerald perhaps they've in fact become a database 
creator/provider more than a journal publisher? I.e. there may be 
more database subscribers who get it than print subscribers ever 
existed.

I think there's a really interesting set of questions embedded in 
such a transformation. The cost of duplication etc. in the print 
environment probably sets some limits of how few "subscribers" 
you have before a title is allowed to expire. I.e. there's only 
so much loss a publisher could take on a mature title before it 
would be spiked. How, in a database driven production environment 
do publishers get signals that a particular title isn't viable or 
isn't contributing enough to be worth producing? Is there 
anything that would convince a publisher absent print 
subscriptions as a market inducement to kill a title other than 
lack of paper flow? How does a "journal" die if its chief 
manifestation is in a database package as part of a package sale?

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
phone 704 687-2825


-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Bergstrom [mailto:tedb@econ.ucsb.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2006 2:50 PM
To: Hamaker, Chuck
Cc: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Microsoft's Currency Converter and the Emerald Sixpack

Thanks, Chuck, for pointing this out.  There are two things to 
straighten out here.

1) Dr. Steuer's letter, which was written in Microsoft Word 
quotes the price as of Journal of Economic Studies at 6,000 
English pounds per year.  When it exported the letter to text, MS 
Word thought that the English pound symbol was A3, thus the 
translitterated expression read A36,000.  (I apologize for not 
catching that.)

2)  The six copies that he refers to are presumably the 6 issues 
that constitute one year's subscription. According to Ulrich's 
Periodical index, JES is published bimonthly:  The

2006 prices quoted by Ulrichs for JES are:

EUR 9,884.29 subscription per year in Europe
USD 9,859 subscription per year in North America
AUD 12,489 subscription per year in Australasia
GBP 6,817.54 subscription per year In Uk & Elsewhere

In 2003, they published a little more than 600 pages per year in 
these 6 issues.  Curiously, I don't have access to a more recent 
copy of JES and so I don't know how many pages there were in 
2005.

Ted