From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:12:33 -0600

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 5:26 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
>  Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:37:24 +0000
>
>> Yes -- to the degree that publishers are able to command very high per-article prices. Whether they're able to do so will depend on the degree to which their articles are a) indispensable and b) non-substitutable. This points up one of the fundamental structural problems of the scholarly marketplace: the fact that the consumers of
articles don't directly feel the pain of high prices.

I ran into you at the ALA and you gave me a brief elaboration of this
theory (adding that you knew full well there was a lot to unpack - and
you didn't mean to suggest all academic work was fungible). I think
the more fundamental structural problem is that there is (financial)
pain involved in accessing articles largely produced by labor paid for
by the academic community itself.  On the other hand, it would seem
that making scholars aware of the costs associated with their
preferences would increase the awareness of this fundamental
structural problem - a necessity for political rather than purely
economic reasons.

>> A patron who insists that the library provide access to Article X might suddenly become willing to settle for a related-and-cheaper Article Y if he had to pay the price difference himself, or he might change course and investigate a different topic altogether if Article X and similar articles from other publishers were unaffordable. But since the library's end-users have no exposure to the cost of the articles they use, they have no incentive to consider either the dispensability or substitutability of their requests.

While I don't think you're really suggesting that academic interests
be guided by the market price of access to the materials it kind of
sounds like you are.  As rational as this sounds from a purely
economic standpoint, if we think of economics as embedded in a larger
context it is really problematic.  I suppose before the advance of
digitization it would have been more keenly felt - scholars would not
study the contents of some archive unless they could get a grant to go
study them (needing money to subsidize the geographical relocation and
biological sustenance of the researching organism for the extent of
the archive exploration, along with any fees associated with access to
the research materials themselves.)

Now, although many of these physical hindrances are overcome, we have
the introduction of what Peter Frase calls the "Anti-Star Trek theory
of posterity." He summarizes it thusly:

>> Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?  Economists like to say that capitalist market economies work optimally when they are used to allocate scarce goods. So how to maintain capitalism in a world where scarcity can be largely overcome?

Most of the prices in question are not "market" prices per se
precisely (as you point out) because they are set by the monopoly
owners of the copyright.  And, just so I'm clear in my assumptions,
the per article price I see on the website when I go as a
non-subscriber to a journal is not the same that the University of
Utah will pay - and more than likely, the price UU will pay is
different than any number of other large or small universities (though
because of NDAs we don't know exactly what they are paying per article
or per subscription.)

This makes talking about the price system in relation to academic
publishing sort of like using Ptolemaic math for calculating escape
velocity: it's easier, for the sake of simplicity to assume the earth
is the center of the universe.  Therefore, from your perspective as a
library director, the relevant actors in the price system are the
patrons who cluelessly deplete the library budget because they don't
feel the effects of their choices.  But the alternative seems to be to
arbitrarily punish (through direct rationing) scholars who are
interested in an arbitrarily high-priced journal articles.  And since
the higher priced articles are likely the most current and relevant
research (though that's no guarantee) it effectively punishes them for
attempting to add to that body of current and relevant research.

>> Rationing has always been what libraries do, and we will continue to do it for as long as we have limited resources with which to provide access. The question (or one question, anyway) is whether we'll have to continue rationing in a fundamentally silly way (at the journal title level) or will be able to figure out a way to do it in a way that makes sense (at the article level).

I think I see what you're saying - and it has been an enlightening
line of argument re: the end of subscriptions and especially the Big
Deal.  But it really seems like changing the system through the price
system is a really roundabout approach.  All the balls (or almost all)
are in the court of the people arbitrarily setting the prices so that
the "fundamentally silly way" remains cheaper overall than the
apparently more sensible way.  But it's worth noting that even these
distinctions are a result of the system they have set up: it wouldn't
be any more or less expensive or troublesome to give access to all
articles in a journal as opposed to just the most popular one (or the
only "desired" one) if the prices weren't set that way.  How would
making faculty aware of the price of their preferences affect this
change economically?  My sense is that, over a long period of time,
you argue the publishers might come to their senses and lower their
price for the article in order to make it more competitive with the
"substitutable" article that might be priced lower.  This would
reintroduce the price system so that they might feel its pinch instead
of libraries.  But as an academic, it is hard to imagine how this
would work.  For me, article X and Y might be related (though it might
always be necessary to see article X in some form, if only to be
familiar with its contents).  But for another scholar, approaching
article X from a different discipline or with a different problem in
mind, article X might be more related to article S or article W,
making the market of substitutable products very wide indeed.

It would take a very aware publisher - one keyed into not only
effective demand (i.e. those willing to pay) but those who might find
the article and be unwilling or unable to pay for it.  This is further
diluted by the fact that there are all kinds of informal economies
among academics and scholars wherein people ask colleagues at other
universities to get them copies of articles for which their
institution is unable or unwilling to provide access.  Because of the
perverted price system, this is largely felt to be completely ethical,
even if is likely illegal.  This, too, makes faculty some of the least
likely candidates to have these incentives change their economic
behavior.  Their political behavior: perhaps.

Would it not be a more economical use of our energy to focus more of
it on changing the irrational universe publishers have constructed
rather than trying to rationalize it through faculty incentives?  I'm
also perfectly open to the distinctive possibility that I completely
misunderstand your proposal, in which case I long for your blunt
correction.

Thanks,
Sean Andrews