From: "Hamaker, Charles" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:02:02 +0000

f publishers would provide COUNTER Journal Report 5 routinely, we
might be able to make more rational choices about which  journals'
articles are more reasonably supplied via pay per use pricing. With it
 we could easly determine how much per article from the current year
of a journal we are really paying.

Chuck Hamaker

________________________________________
From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum]
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 6:24 PM
From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:27:21 -0800

No comment on the specifics of Bill's proposal, but the general thrust
of usage-based pricing is that it will make the competition among
publishers for books and articles that are used most often even
keener.  I suspect that many of the people on this list are unaware
that publishers incur most of their costs before something is printed
or put on a server.  With usage-based pricing, you have all of the
costs up front, but an increasingly uncertain prospect for which
titles will earn revenue and which will not.  This will likely make
publishers more conservative about the content they publish.  Do we
want that?  In the trade, this would probably be a shrug, since the
entire segment is oriented to commerce, but for academic publications?

Usage-based pricing is the rational choice.  The question is whether
we want publishing to be rational all the time.

Joe Esposito