Elsevier is much in the news
Elsevier is much in the news
Keywords: Pricing, Document supply, British Library, Journal publishing
Elsevier now owns 1,500 STM titles after its acquisition of Harcourt and controls around 20 per cent of the market, although given the nature of STM publishing this means a quasi monopoly in many subject areas. Chairman, Derck Haank, in an interview with Richard Poynder in Information Today (Vol. 19 No. 4) addresses some of the criticisms of its pricing and licensing policy. Haank goes into considerable detail on Elsevier's pricing policy, although the degree to which the reforms that he describes translate into actual savings in any particular library is not at all clear. Their back file has now been digitised and is available for between $8,000 and $40,000. This is potentially very exciting and they must be applauded for this expensive initiative. However the price translates into an awful lot of ILL/pay per view requests for material that is rarely asked for. Elsevier's eChoice now allows "customers to electronically subscribe to a journal they did not previously subscribe to at 90 per cent of the print price." However the practical effect of this if a library already subscribes to all the titles through a site licencse package is not obvious.
Separately, Elsevier has come to an agreement with the British Library which allows for the BL to use 1,000 titles for electronic document delivery including abstracts. The BL now offers secure credit card payment on both its ZETOC and its Inside service which will improve significantly their service for unmediated end users and corporate card holders. Although Elsevier is often accused of being uncooperative it should be said that they have always been prepared to negotiate with the BL – the largest document supplier in the world –and have often been in the forefront of cooperative projects.
