T.Scott Plutchak spricht – welche Koinzidenz! – in Talking to Publishers meine Befürchtungen bezüglich der APE-Konferenz an:
I’ve been asked to come to a meeting in a couple of weeks to talk about my „vision of the library of the future.“ The audience in this case will be 100 senior managers of Elsevier. Talk about an anthropological expedition!
Im weiteren kriegen wir Bibliothekare auch unser (wohlverdientes) Fett ab:
Elsevier personifies everything that librarians hate about publishers. But that antipathy also reveals much of the economic ignorance that librarians bring to the issue. Elsevier is routinely accused of price-gouging and of being „predatory“. As someone who sends nearly half a million dollars to Elsevier every year for our share of ScienceDirect, I’m certainly sympathetic to the pain, but Elsevier is just doing what successful companies are supposed to do. I’ve heard librarians say, in disgust, „They just charge what they think the market will bear!“ The tone suggests this is the height of unethical behavior. It is, of course, standard practice for setting prices in any market. I’ve talked to reps of other publishers who say they just wait to see what kind of increase Elsevier is putting in and set theirs a percent or half a percent lower in order to come in under the radar.
