Once a school has signed up for the Big Deal with the largest publishers,
it becomes very difficult for a journal or journals of a smaller publisher
to compete to replace the print journals to which the school
subscribes. Because of the structure of the Big Deal contracts, canceling
a print journal yields little savings, because cancellation saves only a
fraction of the journal’s list price (in some cases, 10 percent). So, for
example, while the price of the Journal of Economic Theory, an Elsevier
title, was $2070 per year in 2002, canceling the journal might only have
saved a school $207. This means that if a competitor offers an alternative
journal comparable to the Journal of Economic Theory for $300, and the
library could not afford both, the library would not take the alternative
journal—to do so would actually cost the library $100 extra. To compete
effectively, the publisher of alternative journals either must price below
$200, or it must produce its own bundle of journals of sufficient size
and breadth that the school would actually be willing to cancel all of
ScienceDirect instead of just the print titles
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