Pricing/License Translucency: A Proposal for Publishers and Libraries

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

Everyone is probably sick to death of this topic by now, but I'm 
going to risk starting a new thread about pricing secrecy and 
pricing transparency.  This message will end with a question for 
my librarian colleagues, so I hope that those who are tired of 
the topic but who may have an opinion on the question will 
soldier through to the end and send a response (either directly 
to me or to the list).

Now that I've had a week or so to reflect on my experience with 
Nature and its demand for total secrecy of pricing and license 
terms, and on my on-list conversation with Peter Banks and Joe 
Esposito and others about the implications of total pricing 
transparency, it's occurred to me that there may be room for a 
compromise on which both publishers and libraries can agree.  It 
seems to me that there is really no reason why we should have to 
choose between Pricing Blackout (the position of Nature and a few 
other publishers on the fringe of this issue) and Pricing 
Transparency (as characterized by Joe's "public posting of 
prices/licenses" scenario).

I'd like to propose a compromise, which we might call Pricing 
Translucency: suppose a license agreement were to contain a 
clause like this: "Subject to applicable law, Licensee shall 
refrain from publicizing or otherwise broadly distributing the 
terms of this License (including pricing) in any public forum."

It seems to me that a term like this should satisfy both the 
desire of publishers not to see public broadcast of the results 
of their individual price and license negotiations, while also 
allowing librarians the desired leeway to talk to each other 
individually about their negotiation experiences.  I don't know 
of any librarian who wants to take out a full-page ad in the New 
York Times saying what price she ended up getting from Nature; 
most of us just want to be able to answer individual colleagues 
who ask us questions.

I was going to ask the publishers who participate or lurk on this 
list to say whether they think a clause like this would be 
acceptable, but I think that question is more or less answered by 
the fact that the vast majority of publishers don't put 
confidentiality clauses in their licenses.  What I do wonder, 
though, is whether librarians would generally find such a clause 
acceptable.  Any thoughts?  (Off-list replies welcome; if there's 
interest, I can summarize for the list without identifying 
respondents.)

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu