Accepted Wednesday Oct 21, 2009
The extraction of the nuclear incompressibility from isoscalar giant monopole resonance (GMR) measurements is analysed. Pairing and may play a role in the shift of the GMR energy between the doubly closed shell 208Pb nucleus and other Pb isotopes. Pairing effects are microscopically predicted using the constrained Hartree-Fock Bogoliubov method. Accurate measurements of the GMR in open-shell Pb isotopes are called for.