12. University libraries are expected by faculty and graduate students to carry the important, if not all, the technical journals that are relevant to their fields. In fact, the quality and depth of the library may significantly affect a university's ranking and its ability to attract well known scholars and promising graduate students, which in turn affects its ability to attract research grants and donations. For these reasons a university library's demand for technical journals may be very inelastic. They have little choice but to subscribe to most such journals.

Because libraries must subscribe to these journals, individual professors, grad students, scientists, and others tend to have a relatively elastic demand for these publications, after all they can go to the library (professors don't even have to leave their offices, they can have a grad student photocopy articles of interest).