by Dana Roth
A recent news item in the LA Times headlined … ” European vacations about 25% cheaper because of drop in euro’s value”, and this presumably also applies to vacations in Britain.
In this regard, while IOP Publishing has been a generous and long-time supporter of libraries and librarians, their US$ journal subscription pricing leaves something to be desired.
For 2015 Package Z subscriptions, the IOP shows an ‘electronic only’ price of: 59,542 GBP and $116,151 [ http://librarians.iop.org/instinfo ] … with the USD price calculated on the basis of an exchange rate of $1.95/GBP. Latin American countries are given a slight break at: $111,899, which appears to be calculated on the basis of an exchange rate of $1.88/GBP.
Looking at the US$/GBP exchange rate fluctuations over the past year …
the rate in April 2014 was 1.71 US$/GBP (which would justify a Package Z price of $101,817) …
and then began a steady decline to 1.60 US$/GBP in November (which would justify a Package Z price of $95,267) …
and has continued to decline to $1.48 US$/GBP, this week.
Given the difficulties the IOP seems to have in setting a reasonable US$/GBP exchange rate, one alternative would be for the IOP to adopt a ‘Transparent-Pricing Policy’ which would apply some of a given year’s exchange rate profits to reducing the next year’s subscription price.
This would be similar, in concept, to the Royal Society’s ‘transparent-pricing’ policy that accounts for income, from ‘author-pays’ open access articles, in setting future subscription rates.
http://royalsocietypublishing.org/librarians/transparent-pricing
