With Tim Gowers at the head, followed by a distinguished caravan of scholars a movement as emerged to boycott Elsevier.
Three arguments are offered in favor of the boycott that I reproduce below.
1)They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals.
2) They sell journals in very large “bundles,” so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals.
3)They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.
#2 caught my attention. Suppose, I offer you journal A and journal B as a bundle for $5000 a year. Suppose also, consistent with the premise of #2, you only read journal A but not B. Am I forcing you to consume journal B? No. I can always unbundle and offer you journal A alone for $5000 a year. Indeed, if no one reads journal B, why bother supporting it? I could junk it and reduce costs without reducing revenues! Thus, complaint # 2 taken at face value is either wrong headed or repeats complaint #1.
I should point out that I have published in some Elsevier journals, served on and still serve on some Elsevier boards.
The Leisure of the Theory Class 
6 comments
February 1, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Anonymous
Without argument #2, one could successfully(?) counter argument #1 with “the journals are individually very affordable when bundled together”.
But were the bundles eliminated: (1) this counter argument would not be valid, and (2) there’d be no need for argument #2 (which you have shown).
But in reality the bundles exist, so argument #2 is needed to counter that counter.
February 1, 2012 at 12:47 pm
rvohra
Dear nkugateway.nku.edu
I view argument #1 as being an equity one, that could stand independently of the (faulty) argument #2. Journals generate value, V, say. Elsevier charges V – \epsilon to Universities. However, it is individual scholars at the University that help generate that value V. So, surely they (either individually or collectively) are entitled to keep a larger share of it.
February 1, 2012 at 8:21 pm
kevincure@gmail.com
Rakesh,
The usual argument against “Big Deal” licensing is that it is a strategic barrier to entry for new journals. A research library has budget X. Popular journal is available for Y by itself. Now it is only available for Y+Z=X in a bundle with other journals that have limited value for readers. Z is much less than Y, say. New journal entrant with price Z, wants to enter to compete with X. Libraries value Z at 90% of what they value X. But they cannot subscribe under the “Big Deal” license because the only way to free up money for the new journal is to cancel X. Edlin and Rubinfeld in the Antitrust Law Journal 2004 is the standard reference here, but also see Ted Bergstrom (the UCSB economist working a lot on journal pricing) here: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/BundleContracts.html
February 2, 2012 at 12:08 am
rvohra
Agreed. In fact its a problem I assign in my pricing class. Note that the bundling as barrier to entry argument relies on an assumption about credibility or timing. Even so, let us accept it as a replacement for the current argument #2. However, this presumes that entry of new journals is a good thing! They may simply provide more outlets for bad papers.
February 2, 2012 at 11:15 am
Max
“However, this presumes that entry of new journals is a good thing! They may simply provide more outlets for bad papers.”
They may be bad journals and in that case vanish into irrelevance. But they may also publish decent articles and undercut Elsevier in prices.
However, I agree with you: #2 is merely a footnote of #1.
February 2, 2012 at 5:56 pm
Mohammad
There is also the issue of uncertainty. Librarians don’t necessarily know the value of every journal. If there was a free market to buy individual journals, the market could aggregate the signals. In the absence of that, each library has to make decision under uncertainty, which, if we assume a risk-taking behavior (reasonable in a research environment), will lead to over-estimating the values.