From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:49:54 -0800

Thanks to Chris Armbruster for reminding us that higher ed actually
has lots of experience with usage-based pricing. This is true of
libraries, too, with reserves and coursepacks.

Here are two examples of how current usage-based pricing can actually
be a lot more expensive than open access:

If an article is needed by a class, it might pay for the library to
pay the article processing fee to make the article open access - even
if the author had nothing to do with your institution. For example:

Over at the Copyright Clearance Center, I just looked up the cost for
an article published in a Sage journal for reuse in a coursepack /
library reserve for 300 students over 2 semesters as an institutional
non-subscriber. The cost was $1,638 U.S. As the Copyright Clearance
Center site points out, this is just re-use rights; this does not get
me the actual article. Re-use for institutional subscribers apparently
is free.

If my institution could not afford to subscribe to this journal, it
would have been better to have paid for the article to be published as
open access at PLoS ONE at $1,350 U.S
Details:  http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/open-access-to-save-costs-for-teaching.html

Want to put a hundred copies of Selling out feminism, an article
published by multinational conglomerate Informa.plc under the "Taylor
& Francis" brand? That'll cost you more than $3,600 US.
Details:  http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/selling-out-feminism-100-photocopies.html

Heather Morrison