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