[Irtalk] How much did your university pay for your journals? | Science/AAAS | News

[Hilton Gibson]

"We have a collective-action problem," says Tim Gowers, a mathematician at
the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom who launched a petition
calling for a boycott of Elsevier. "*If all libraries were simultaneously
to refuse to sign any more Big Deals and switched instead to paying for
journal subscriptions individually*, then the market rate for the journals
would be at a level where they reflected the actual value of the
subscriptions to the universities, which is much lower than the current
list prices." Price transparency is "just one step that has to be taken if
there is to be any chance of revolutionary change," he says. "The actual
problem is that we're all paying too much."
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http://news.sciencemag.org/economics/2014/06/how-much-did-your-university-pay-your-journals
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