FW: FTE-based pricing

["John McDonald" <jmcdonald@library.caltech.edu>]

Rick might be right to an extent - for those libraries like his 
that can accept most price increases as they are presented.  I 
definitely agree that if the budget can stand the impact, there's 
no need to negotiate.

I think I should have qualified my statement to say that I 
believe more and more academic research libraries in the nation 
are negotiating prices nearly every single year with every single 
publisher.

And as Toby Green pointed out, it's usually with the big 
commercial publishers and thus a few negotiations cover many 
journals.  But that does not stop small publishers from 
presenting new pricing models nearly every year (a recent example 
from my experience is American Academy of Pediatrics) or for 
complexity take a look at the University of Chicago Press' new 
model.

I believe that I counted over a dozen new pricing models this 
year among our less than 2500 subscriptions.  And that doesn't 
include the 50% of our title list covered by our subscriptions to 
the big three commercial publishers.

My point is that we should not dissuade ourselves from usage 
based pricing (and the inherent negotiations that go with it) 
because it will be too much work.

John McDonald
Acquisitions Librarian
California Institute of Technology

BTW, I do know that most libraries are covered by long term contracts,
or by consortial negotiations, or by very large publishers, or a
combination of all.  Usage based pricing still works for all those
situations.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Rick Anderson
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2006 1:29 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: FTE-based pricing

> 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