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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A quiet revolution is sweeping the $20 billion academic publishing market and its main operator Elsevier, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians.
When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1 million extra in pay-per-view fees.
But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.
Mutinous librarians such as Ms. Etschmaier remain in a minority but are one of a host of pressures bearing down on the subscription business of Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including the world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet.
The company is facing a profound shift in the way it does business, as customers reject traditional charging structures.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 15 2020, @07:05PM (1 child)
Well, let us consider school children. Pre-teens, maybe, but teens definitely. Whether they take on a project, or an assignment, or they're just curious, school kids should be able to research just about anything. Are the school kids around you welcome at the library? I know that I was made very welcome, all through school, and after I left school. I'm still welcome at the community college library. I've never been turned away by a librarian, anywhere - east coast, west coast, Alaska or middle America.
Elsevier? Maybe I can't define the point at which Elsevier becomes a parasite any better than you can. But, it's pretty obvious that they're a lot more parasite-like than any library in the US. Elsevier most definitely does not welcome curious school children, unless those school children have a whole lot of lunch money to spare.
Sorry, I can't address libraries outside of the US.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday February 15 2020, @07:14PM
Fair point, and that's part of why I left my comment ambiguous. Leaving a little bit of thinking up to the reader can be helpful.
The librarians are stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. They only have budgets to support bringing in $X dollars of new material. If Elsevier is sucking up 25% of that and they could get more material for the same money, then the choice is an easy one to make.