RE: FTE-based pricing

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

> 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.

With all due respect to John, he's describing a reality that is 
completely foreign to me -- and while I don't claim for a moment 
that mine is a perfect example of the average library, I think 
we're more typical than strange in this regard.  We do examine 
prices at renewal time, but negotiation is unusual, because most 
of the time price increases are more or less what we expect them 
to be.  (And this is a very good thing, because there's no way we 
could possibly negotiate "nearly every year with nearly every 
single publisher.")  Nor does FTE pricing usually involve the 
kinds of tortuous hair-splitting that John describes above. 
Usually, FTE pricing is based on a system than involves a few 
tiers, and we can see quickly and easily which one we fit into. 
Sometimes it's more complicated than that, but very rarely.

Again, I'm not asserting that our experience at UNR is perfectly 
typical, but I think it's pretty common.

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