Elsevier has come under fire in recent years for what many librarians have said are unreasonably high prices. Libraries would have the choice of paying solely for print journals, solely for electronic access, or for both simultaneously. Mr. Metzner says his company offers libraries something close to that kind of choice now, but librarians say the deals they've made with Academic Press have not allowed for much flexibility. In most deals that library consortia have signed with the company, license prices are the sum of what the member libraries recently paid for printed journals, plus a surcharge for electronic access. John Wiley and Sons, another large publisher, began offering electronic versions of its scientific journals a few months ago.
Officials there decline to talk about pricing models.
Non-profit publishers of scholarly journals, such as the American Chemical Society and the American Mathematical Society, are less defensive about their pricing policies. Librarians rarely criticize their prices, which can be as little as a fifth of those charged by similar commercial publications, according to studies reviewed in this month's Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Beyond questions of affordability lie other areas in which libraries and publishers of all stripes may not soon agree. The topic on which the two sides are most likely to agree is the coalition's request for stable archiving. Publishers say they are eager to talk about such options as delivering archived material in CD-ROM or on computer tapes.