From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
 Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:37:24 +0000

>While I have long thought that different, at least partially usage-based,
>charging models (perhaps along the lines of utilities, phones etc) could
>be fairer, they are not overall likely to save librarians and readers any
>money, unless publishers are able and willing to settle for less income.
>Is that the case?

Yes -- to the degree that publishers are able to command very high
per-article prices. Whether they're able to do so will depend on the
degree to which their articles are a) indispensable and b)
non-substitutable. This points up one of the fundamental structural
problems of the scholarly marketplace: the fact that the consumers of
articles don't directly feel the pain of high prices. A patron who insists
that the library provide access to Article X might suddenly become willing
to settle for a related-and-cheaper Article Y if he had to pay the price
difference himself, or he might change course and investigate a different
topic altogether if Article X and similar articles from other publishers
were unaffordable. But since the library's end-users have no exposure to
the cost of the articles they use, they have no incentive to consider
either the dispensability or substitutability of their requests.

Rationing has always been what libraries do, and we will continue to do it
for as long as we have limited resources with which to provide access. The
question (or one question, anyway) is whether we'll have to continue
rationing in a fundamentally silly way (at the journal title level) or
will be able to figure out a way to do it in a way that makes sense (at
the article level).

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
University of Utah
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