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
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 1:59 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
> To: 'LibLicense-L Discussion Forum' <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:20:43 +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?
>
> Sally Morris
> South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU
> Email: [log in to unmask]
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum
> Sent: 17 January 2012 22:31
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Moving towards paying only for usage?
>
> From: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:45:13 +0000
>
> As a publisher I sense librarian dissatisfaction about how publishers offer
> their wares to libraries. Traditional single journal subscriptions are
> condemned as too expensive; discounted multi-journal 'Big Deals' often
> entail taking a proportion of unwanted, unused, content.
>
> Here, I want to briefly explore an idea which might go some way to meeting
> libraries desires for better value from publishers, and creating a closer
> relationship between payment and usage.
>
> Take all amounts as purely hypothetical, simply for the purposes of
> argument. Suppose, for an annual fee of $1500, a library could access all my
> journals and the backfiles - see http://multi-science.metapress.com
> Downloads would be charged at $5 each. At year end, if the library had had
> more than 300 downloads, we would invoice them for the balance. So that the
> library is protected from unlimited liability, we would set a cap, the
> maximum we could charge regardless of how many downloads - say $10,000 for a
> major institution, $3500 for a smaller one. To further eliminate
> uncertainty, agreements could be for 3 years, with fixed price increases -
> which could be 0%. 3 years worth of data would then give an equitable basis
> for renewing, renegotiating, or cancelling the contract. The core point is
> that, through this approach, steadily we move towards a world where payment
> is for usage only, which is where librarians seem to want to be going.
>
> It may be that this model or something like it is common anyway, so I am
> merely re-inventing existing practice: it would be useful to be told. It may
> be that there are practical reasons in the way libraries work, perhaps in
> terms of budget allocations or purchasing cycles, that make this idea a
> non-starter, and I would be interested to know about such constraints. Or it
> may even be a useful thought.
>
> I would welcome feedback from the library community.
>
> Bill Hughes
> Director
> Multi-Science Publishing Co Ltd
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