> I respectfully disagree.  I don¹t see how it costs any more to give access to
> a campus of 25,000 than it does to a campus of 1,000 students.   What does the
> number of students have to do with production cost?

If the only costs that had to be recovered were production costs, you'd be
exactly right.  But in fact, providing an ongoing service involves ongoing
costs, including server maintenance (you need more, bigger, and more robust
servers to accommodate more customers), customer service support (you get
more complaints and more problems with more customers), and back-office
staff and infrastructure (more invoices, more mailings, more phone calls,
etc.).

To say that the only costs publishers should recover are production costs is
like saying all the library needs is a materials budget.  Buying the books
is only the beginning of the expense of providing ongoing access to a
library collection.  Same goes for providing ongoing access to an online
service.

--
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
Univ. of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu
(801) 721-1687