I personally do not believe that librarians are thieves. Eric. I have been a librarian and have taught in what was originally a library school. In my longer experience of publishers and at senior management level and certainly not a believer in unconstrained capitalism, my picture is different.
All publishers need to make a surplus or profit depending on their governance. In the first place you are aiming to make the budget. It is actually rather inconvenient if you make too much and causes a lot of problems for you in setting future budgets.
Secondly, in the long run publishers are dependent on their authors (contributors) and authors (editors and editorial boards/ learned society councils). If you try to squeeze your assets for short term gain eventually (maybe quite quickly) you lose out and decline. Obviously also they are dependent on their readers and the proxies (librarians), but I now suggest to you Eric that librarians really do not always appreciate how close publishers are to the research communities they serve.
Notice that I make no distinction between “commercial” and not for profits. We could argue about this but let's do it offline
Anthony
From: Eric Elmore <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2019 18:52:51 +0000
The underlying premise of the argument that librarians leverage an illegal site to avoid paying for content is that librarians are thieves. When librarians say that’s not true and we don’t do that, we’re met with disbelief. So not only are we thieves but liars to boot. No offense intended I’m sure.
If my inclusion of the blood-sucking part in my description of capitalism was hurtful and not up to the spirit of the list I do apologize. I admit it was flippant and over the top and unnecessary. The rest of my description however is accurate. Capitalism IS a wealth extraction system, and for-profit entities in such a system have the primary goal of profit maximization do they not? I’m sure it sounds better stated that way, but the essence is the same.
From: Alex Holzman <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2019 13:48:19 -0400
Anthony is smarter than I to respond to Eric's post with sarcasm. With all due respect, the post violates the spirit of this list, where librarians and publishers often strenuously disagree, but almost always remain entirely civil. I don't speak for others, but as a former full-time and now part-time publisher, I don't appreciate being portrayed as a blood-sucking, money-grabbing beast. I spent years in both commercial and non-profit publishing and worked with librarians over the decades and I can assure you the people on both sides of this issue, whatever their disagreements, are overwhelmingly good and decent people working to disseminate learning as broadly as they can. (The post is also ignorant in its assumption that all publishers are for-profit, but that is kind of beside the point.) I would like to believe this was a heat of the moment post because I don't know how any of us could resolve our issues if one side consists solely of devils (and the other of angels?). And I don't know how any of us could actually believe such is the case.
Alex Holzman