From: Lloyd Davidson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:08:12 -0600

While pay-for-use certainly pertains to books, an important area that
has its own set of  issues, the major discussion of academic
pay-per-use systems involves the underwriting of journal article
access, which is where most academic library funds are spent, at least
in the sciences, although a great deal of funding also goes for
subscriptions to expensive databases like Web of Science and Chemical
Abstracts that provide bibliographic access to these journals.  The
two  systems, monograph vs. journal purchases, certainly have many
parallels but monographs make up a relatively small proportion of at
least most science library acquisitions and ILL can provide adequate
access to most of those mongraphic works that a library does not
purchase, as long as there is some lead time before they are needed.
I can't imagine a pay-per-use metric that would automatically lead to
a purchase (i.e. subscription) of a journal title, at least not one of
the more expensive ones ($20,000 or more a year) and libraries
typically request copies of individual articles, not whole journal
issues.  While a book approval plan has some superficial similarity to
journal subscriptions, the two systems are wildly different in their
function.

The idea of allowing open purchases of journal articles by faculty and
students until a spending cap is reached would create a disastrous
chaos among researchers, where anybody's need who ordered articles
before the limit was meant would be served and everybody who requested
an article after that, e.g. after April 1 in major research
institutions, would either have to pay for such articles out of their
personal or their grant's funds or do without.  The bookkeeping costs
alone of such a system could cost many thousands of dollars a year.

BTW, due to increased "handling charges" resulting from  the
processing of article orders, I foresee the cost of individual
articles increasing far faster than even the cost of journal
subscriptions, which is already well ahead of the rate of inflation.

Lloyd Davidson


On Jan 25, 2012, at 6:16 PM, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:35:29 -0600

Is not PDA a form of "usage-based pricing" for books?  PDA services
provide access to all (or almost all) of a publishers' books, and a
usage metric determines when a purchase occurs. A budget for PDA
provides a "cap" on how much money is to be spent in this way every
year.  This contrasts with the "approval plan" model where all books
fitting a certain category are purchased without regard to
demonstrated actual need, much as a subscription provides access to
all articles in a journal regardless of how many of them are actually
ever used.  Are there significant differences I'm missing?

Sandy Thatcher