Jstor by Schonfeld Roger C.; Varian Hal;

Author:Schonfeld, Roger C.; Varian, Hal;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CONSORTIA

Also included in the Strategic and Operating Plan, but eventually modified, was JSTOR’s consideration of consortia. Bowen and Guthrie appear initially to have been influenced by their experience at the Mellon Foundation, which had supported library collaboration both in the United States and abroad. For example, consortia of American liberal arts colleges seemed like an ideal model for bringing greater efficiency to certain operations that might not otherwise remain tenable, with discussions in this period leading to the eventual creation of the Virtual Classics Department among the Associated Colleges of the South.62 In Eastern Europe, especially, it became clear that more centralized, or “tight,” consortia could yield substantial savings coupled with vastly improved services.63 But Mellon had only sponsored collaborative consortia.

In the early 1990s, American academic libraries realized that they could use their market power to negotiate with publishers for lower prices. Digital publications had relatively low marginal costs compared with printed materials, but publishers generally made no effort to adjust pricing to take this into account. Instead, prices continued to rise. Librarians felt that publishers had increased flexibility in setting prices for digital materials. As a result, the consortia movement boomed, as individual libraries came together to negotiate deals.64

Perhaps as a result of Mellon’s consortia-related experiences, along with the attention consortia were attracting at the time, the Strategic and Operating Plan initially imagined JSTOR following the lead of virtually all other electronic data providers. JSTOR would license access to consortia of academic libraries at discounted rates. It envisioned a sliding scale of discounts based on the number of members in the consortium.65 Guthrie recalls this sliding scale as more of a placeholder for discussion purposes than as an intended outcome.66

Had JSTOR sold its content title by title, consortia might have served a valuable purpose by selecting a preset number of titles for its entire membership, a function that was now irrelevant. But with the business model altered to eliminate many of the uncertainties in sales—so that any subscribing library would have to take the entire collection at a flat rate—it became much more difficult to understand the role of the consortium. One remaining benefit would be to encourage the participation of libraries unlikely to join. Another would be to speed the licensing process, which would bring increased operating revenues in the near term, decreasing the need to “burn” capital. But JSTOR’s value-based pricing was specifically designed to reflect the value to an institution of participating. Giving further discounts to consortia could only have the effect of upsetting the value-based calibrations in JSTOR’s business model and possibly even threatening its long-term viability.

Moreover, when he was beginning to discuss the JSTOR pricing structure, Guthrie began to hear from enthusiastic librarians. One in particular warned him, “We’re going to be in from the start, but I don’t want to learn later that everyone else got a cheaper price than us because we came in first.” Guthrie recalls this comment clarifying for him the fairness issues implicit in pricing cooperatives; is it fair

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