Dear colleagues,

according to the english Wikipedia,

"Dyscalculia is a lesser known disability, similar and potentially
related to dyslexia and developmental dyspraxia. Dyscalculia occurs in
people across the whole IQ range, and sufferers often, but not always,
also have difficulties with time, measurement, and spatial reasoning." (...)

Potential symptoms include ...
"Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes even
at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a
shopping basket or balancing a checkbook."
"Poetic ability. Good visual memory for the printed word."
"May do fairly well in subjects such as science and geometry, which
require logic rather than formulae, until a higher level requiring
calculations is obtained."
"Poor long-term memory (retention & retrieval) of concept mastery."
"Difficulty with conceptualizing time and judging the passing of time.
May be chronically late."
"Lack "big picture/ whole picture" thinking."
"Difficulty with games such as poker with more flexible rules for scoring."
"Difficulty in activities requiring sequential processing, from the
physical (such as dance steps) to the abstract (reading, writing and
signaling things in the right order). May have trouble even with a
calculator due to difficulties in the process of feeding in variables."

I guess all this looks quite familiar to many of us having to deal with
publishers on a daily / annual basis in acquisitions and budgeting.

Signs of serious (and serial) dyscalculia have also surfaced in recent
attempts of publishers to answer the International Coalition of Library
Consortia ICOLC's plea for creating effective pricing and renewal
options for dealing with the global economic crisis and its impact on
consortial licenses.

First SAGE Publications tried to sell us a migration to e-only by
pledging to plant trees and promising considerable savings for
libraries. When we checked the calculation, the "savings" amounted to a
price increase by 15%. The publisher apologized and said, they made an
honest mistake when calculating 2010 list prices. (From our scrapbook on
How Publishers are (not) Helping Libraries in the Downturn ... this time
SAGE, http://twtlong.com/itsbyc).

A lapse in logic surfaced with IOP Publishing, who maintained a price
freeze for e-only compared to 2009 (actually there was no e-only option
in 2009, and you are now offered to get e-only in 2010 for the same
money that still brought you print plus online in 2009). Taking into
account the price differential, we see an increase by 5% on average. IOP
Publishing also fails to take into account that for their european
customers a price differential of only 5% will mean a price increase for
going e-only (due to the higher VAT applicable).

Now comes Oxford Journals.

They tell us "... we are pleased to report that there will be no
increase in the online only price between 2009 and 2010 for the majority
of our journals."
Hm ... 79% certainly is the majority, but it looks already suspicious
that the percentage isn't higher. But if you then examine further and
find out that another 25%+ of the journals (50+) do not follow the
stated rule:

"From 2010 onwards the online only price will be the 'base' price for
all journals we publish (rather than the print-plus-online or combined
price). The print only price will be 110% and the combined price 120% of
the online only price.", ...

with actual surcharges for a combined subscription up to 67% (print up
to 53%) higher than the "base price", you really wonder what's going on
here. Nota bene, the Oxford Journals webpage, at
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/access_purchase/2010/pricing_policy_2010.html
(Pricing Policy and Conditions 2010) lists only 4 exclusions to the 2010
Institutional Price Policy (Journal of Topology and three Journals of
the London Mathematical Society).

Turns out that for a large part of Oxford Journals, namely all in the
Oxford Open program (85 hybrid journals that offer authors an OA option
on a per article basis), pricing of print is actually decoupled from
online. In the words of OUP, from footnote 8 to the Oxford Journals -
Institutional Price List 2010:

"2010 online-only subscription prices for journals offering the optional
Oxford Open model have been adjusted to reflect the amount of open
access content published in each journal in 2008 [compared to 2007]*.
Generally, the more open access content published in a journal, the
lower the future online-only price. However, this picture is sometimes
complicated by other factors such as changes in page extent, issue
frequency, and exchange rate adjustments." [* my amendment, cf. previous
price lists - this probably hasn't changed, as actual evidence from
examples I have checked demonstrate.]

Such a policy has been in effect since at least 2006(07), but why on
earth is this footnote only attached to two journals (JNCI and
Schizophrenia) instead of all ... in the program? And why does OUP not
highlight that their new policy - online only price as the base price
for 'all journals we publish' - does not hold for this large group of
titles? As the discrepancy can be massive, decisions based on the
"general rule" (should we ask our faculty to dispense with print, based
on potential savings?) can be utterly wrong. By the way, if the OA
uptake for these journals increases, OUP lowers just the online only
price, not the online surcharge for combined print+online subscriptions.
This could be a welcome incentive to move away from print but it should
be properly communicated. OUP should clearly lay open how prices for
these titles were actually set, depending on the development of OA
uptake, increases in size (output) if any and other factors. (To be
fair, spot tests have convinced me that the adjustments made accurately
reflect the OA uptake of the journals in question; the formula used for
2010 was: combined rate (2010) = combined rate (2009)*0,95*1,2, print
rate (2010) = combined rate (2009)*0,95*1,1, online only rate (2010) =
combined rate (2009)*0,95*(1 - OA uptake), plus possible adjustments for
occasional other factors, applied to all three rates. The OA uptake
rates for 2008 varied between 0% and 30%. This is a slight improvement
over 2007 where top OA uptake rate was 24% (for "Bioinformatics", same
as 2008), while the average uptake in life sciences was 11% (SSH 2%,
Med, Math 5%, avg 7%) (after Claire Bird: Case Study: Oxford Journals'
adventures in open access, in: Learned Publishing 21 No. 3 (July 2008),
200-208).)

The passing reference, that the picture is sometimes complicated by
"exchange rate adjustments" also aroused our suspicion. We indeed found
three Oxford Open titles published in the US with apparent "exchange
rate adjustments": The online only price for "Nicotine and Tobacco
Research [US]" increases 15% in EUR / GBP, while USD price remains
equal. Same with the Gerontologist package [US] that increases by 33% in
EUR and GBP. The "adjusted exchange rates" are 1.0 for USD/EUR, and 1.5
for both EUR/GBP and USD/GBP. These are apparently the standard "company
rates" used by OUP. For comparison, the current real exchange rate for
EUR/GBP is around 1.2, for USD/GBP around 1.65, and 1,4 for USD/EUR. For
titles published in GB and SG, the "company rates" used are 2 USD/GBP
and 1.5 EUR/GBP. This amounts to "exchange rate profiteering" (to use
the clear language of my friend Dana Roth from Caltech) of 10% in GBP
and 40% in EUR for US based titles, and 20% in USD and 30% in EUR for
titles published in GB and SG. So if anything, we would have expected
"exchange rate adjustments" in the opposite direction.

There is another case among Oxfords OA experiments that leads you to
doubt whether they calculated correctly, or made an "honest mistake", or
are just trying to experiment with pricing and see what happens. This is
"Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (eCAM)". Launched
2004, Publication costs were to be covered by a 10 year sponsorship
grant from Ishikawa Natural Medicine Products Research Center (INMPRC).
In 2007 OUP announced a change in eCAM Open Access Policy: "Oxford
Journals has been providing all eCAM papers “Open Access” without any
charge to authors for the first four volumes since its launch. This has
attracted much enthusiasm, and now the journal is established as one of
the most exciting in the field. Due to great success in experimenting
with the open access system, it has been decided for original articles
to remain “open access” without charge to authors after 2008. However,
all other manuscripts will be subscription based." eCAM has about ca.
55% original research and 45% other articles (reviews, editorials,
commentaries). For the letter, access is subscription based, but eCAM
also joined the Oxford Open program. In 2009 OUP charged academic
libraries GBP 200 for a combined subscription, GBP for Print and GBP 90
for e-only (45%), consistent with a 55% reduction due to the OA content
(this could grow larger, if authors opted in to pay Oxford open charges
for making reviews etc. open access). However, what happened instead?
For 2010 OUP charges GBP 209 for a combined subscription and GBP 190 for
online only - the proportional reduction in online only price due to the
part covered by OA subsidies has mysteriously disappeared. Ups! Nota
bene, size (and output) has actually decreased by 13% since 2005. Now,
as de facto all of eCAM is still open access, libraries could simply
cancel, if anyone really bothered to subscribe so far. (Very likely,
most got it via consortia or other package deals, e.g., in all of
Germany, I found only one regular subscription to this title at academic
medical libraries, at the central library for medicine in Cologne.)

By the way, the announced general change in the price structure from
last year (combined price 100%, print/online 95%) actually means that
print prices for Oxford Journals will increase by 10% for 2010 and
combined print + online prices by 14%. And if you switch to e-only, in
order to save money, as a european customer you still will see a price
increase from 2009 to 2010 of typically 6% (due to the higher VAT
applicable). (The exception are again the Oxford Open titles where real
savings for libraries may be realized if you now switch from a combined
subscription to e-only.) From the publisher's perspective, it certainly
looks a lot better: 5% less from libraries switching from a combined
subscription to e-only is more than offset by the savings in
distribution and printing costs. And 14% more from libraries that still
need print plus online in order to satisfy their clients or are required
to fulfill basic archival roles that are based on maintaining print
collections is a real bonus in these times where most publishers are
pressed to keep increases in the lower single digit regime. In the case
of Oxford Open titles, libraries that continue to subscribe to print
despite the 14% price increase and can afford this, are effectively
subsidizing the open access publishing side of these hybrid journals
because they realize no savings at all from the gradual uptake of OA by
authors.

But back to the statement on the changes in the Oxford Journals
institutional price policy and the communication of such complex
changes, that have far reaching consequences for the budgeting of
libraries. Is it really too much asked to provide more transparency to
customers, to correctly annotate price lists duly noting all exceptions
to a stated policy, and to avoid broad sweeping statements that leave
customers and agencies in the dark to find out what it really means,
when they discover that a large part of the titles does not fit the
description of a revised pricing policy?

Ironically, Oxford Journals just announced on 10 June 2009 that it has
become one of the first STM publishers to achieve ISO 9001:2008
certification for the operations side of its business. The press release
said: "We hope our ISO 9001 certification will demonstrate to our
authors, readers, and purchasers of our content that we have the proper
mechanisms in place to provide a high quality of service to them.
Through ISO 9001:2008 certification Oxford Journals proves that key
working practices undertaken by staff working in its Operations Group
(which includes the Production, IT, and Customer Services departments)
are effective in providing a consistent quality of service." Oh, well
... Is Dyscalculia on the radar of ISO 9001 auditors? Let's hope for the
best.

Is there any hope for a cure? Sage advice? (hm...) ... Ex oriente lux?
Wikipedia closes with the following paragraph:

"Treatment
Dyscalculia has no cure per se, but various treatment options have been
explored including electro-shock therapy. Counselling can help, but not
necessarily to a large degree. No therapy has been properly verified and
proved to be effective. Some anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that
a certain amount of mathematical proficiency can be acquired by
alternative systems of mathematical calculation such as Eastern
mathematics. Anecdotal evidence also suggests, in fact, that dyscalculic
individuals might themselves pursue such systems out of need or
interest. The condition need not be seen as a disability, there is
nothing preventing people who suffer from dyscalculia from succeeding in
other academic fields such as history, geography and other social
sciences, or in artistic fields such as music or drama."

Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library

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