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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 15 2020, @05:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-the-market-will-bear dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 15 2020, @07:12PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 15 2020, @07:12PM (#958583) Journal

    Expensive journals seem like they were a legitimate thing when the only way to share scientific info (study details, etc.) was via print.

    I would question that. I've mentioned a time or two, that I attended school in a pretty wealthy school system. An olympic sized swimming pool in the basement of the high school, for starter. An auditorium that rivaled any movie theater I've ever been in, with a capacity about double the school population. The latest in textbooks. The latest in business machines. Athletics went far beyond baseball-basketball-football.

    With all that wealth, the school system couldn't access science journals. A student had to go out of town, usually Slippery Rock, and use the library at Penn State. Forget Ohio State, which was actually closer - if not a resident, you couldn't use their stuff.

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