Roger Schonfeld, Donald King, Ann Okerson, and Eileen Gifford Fenton, The Nonsubscription Side of Periodicals: Changes in Library Operations and Costs between Print and Electronic Formats, CLIR, June 2004. Excerpt: "In the past 10 years, projections about the cost impact of a shift to the electronic format have led to hard-nosed considerations of business models and prices. With the advent of journal package deals, consortial negotiations, and alternative proposals such as open access, libraries' subscription and license costs, as well as collection sizes and profiles, are changing. As significant as these changes are, they do not capture all of the important shifts in operations and costs that have taken place....In addition to staff time, nonsubscription costs include computer workstations, binding costs, and capital and maintenance expenditures for space, among others. Some have believed that these costs would be lower, perhaps much lower, in the electronic format than they have been in print....There has, however, been little formal consideration of how library operations and nonsubscription costs may vary with the transition to electronic format. Yet these costs are not trivial...." (Thanks to Gary Price.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/17/2004 06:12:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
