Wednesday, October 21, 2015

DDA and the Publishing Industry

Back! Managed to get some creative juices flowing and some spare time to idly muse about things...

I've been prepping a paper on our Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) of eBooks program and I've run across a vein of reactions from publishers on the concept and current models of DDA. It's an aspect of this issue I hadn't directly intended to write about, but I think is important and perhaps represents a perspective many librarians, at least myself, don't normally give a lot of thought to.

It may not be indicative of the industry as a whole, and I suspect DDA (and especially the use of short-term loans (STL) within that model) gives most in the scholarly publishing industry lots of worries, despite a spate of recent publisher-demanded pricing adjustments (increases). There seems to be a common theme that publishers take for granted that academic libraries should share in the financial risk involved in academic publishing. I can only ask: why?

I may find time to write more, but thought it might be helpful to some to read more about this, so here are a couple of posts from the industry perspective I found illuminating: