CE Director Dr. Michael A. Williams, and co-authors Dr. Theodore Bergstrom, Dr. Paul Courant, and Dr. R. Preston McAfee published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Evaluating Big Deal Journal Bundles.”
The article explores the bundle prices of large commercial publisher’s online subscriptions of academic journals. As publishers have insisted that libraries sign confidentiality clauses to keep their prices secret, little is known about the prices that universities pay for bundled access to the journals published by large commercial publishers. Yet, it was possible for the authors to obtain copies of many contracts through Freedom of Information Act requests. The data collected enabled the comparison of bundle prices charged by commercial publishers with those of nonprofit societies and the examination of the types of price discrimination practiced by commercial and nonprofit journal publishers.
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