An Optimization Framework for Efficient Information Supply in the Academic Sector

In recent years, increasing monopolization tendencies in the market for electronic information resources in the academic sector have led to the formation of consortia by university libraries and other academic institutions, which are intended to act as an antipole to increase their bargaining power against the monopolistic structures of the publisher market. The aim of this research paper is the development of a model that determines minimal-cost structures for buying consortia in the context of academic libraries. Two different points of view are discussed: on the one hand the optimal choice of the pricing model for purchasing electronic journals and on the other hand the optimization of consortia structures for bundling bargaining power. For the first part of the framework a break-even based approach is developed and applied to empirical data. It can be shown, that German academic libraries can cut their procurement costs by canceling subscriptions and switching to pay per view by about 30%. The second topic – the consortia structure problem – is solved by a binary non-linear optimization model, which also is applied to a real situation. In future it is able to determine , for example, the optimality of a Germany-wide library consortium and to show efficient alternatives.