Re: Institutional subscription question

[Eleanor Cook <cookei@appstate.edu>]

This is such an old trick -- I used to have to explain to faculty 
(over and over) back in the 1980's and 1990's during serials 
cancellation reviews why this was considered, at the very least, 
unethical.  The premise being that the (less expensive) personal 
subscriptions are subsidized by the (far more expensive) 
institutional subscriptions. Some of the STM publishers used to 
print right on the cover of journal issues if it was an 
institutional or personal subscription and put some kind of 
statement about not substituting.  If you could delve into the 
early archives of this list and others (Marcia Tuttle's 
Newsletter on Serials Pricing comes to mind, as well as SERIALST) 
you would find this discussion repeated several times at least. 
This is not a new idea. However, in the age of electronic 
journals, it's a moot point.  You can't really do this in the 
e-environment.  And this is <not> a problem for consumer 
magazines -- if your faculty want to donate their Time and 
Newsweek, I hardly think anyone would care, but then, those kinds 
of subscriptions don't cost thousands of dollars each.  Whether 
this is legal or not, couldn't say, I am not a lawyer.

Eleanor Cook (formerly a Serials Librarian)

Eleanor I. Cook
Professor & Intellectual Property & Copyright Librarian
Belk Library, ASU Box 32026
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608-2026
cookei@appstate.edu