From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:49:54 -0800 Thanks to Chris Armbruster for reminding us that higher ed actually has lots of experience with usage-based pricing. This is true of libraries, too, with reserves and coursepacks. Here are two examples of how current usage-based pricing can actually be a lot more expensive than open access: If an article is needed by a class, it might pay for the library to pay the article processing fee to make the article open access - even if the author had nothing to do with your institution. For example: Over at the Copyright Clearance Center, I just looked up the cost for an article published in a Sage journal for reuse in a coursepack / library reserve for 300 students over 2 semesters as an institutional non-subscriber. The cost was $1,638 U.S. As the Copyright Clearance Center site points out, this is just re-use rights; this does not get me the actual article. Re-use for institutional subscribers apparently is free. If my institution could not afford to subscribe to this journal, it would have been better to have paid for the article to be published as open access at PLoS ONE at $1,350 U.S Details: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/open-access-to-save-costs-for-teaching.html Want to put a hundred copies of Selling out feminism, an article published by multinational conglomerate Informa.plc under the "Taylor & Francis" brand? That'll cost you more than $3,600 US. Details: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/selling-out-feminism-100-photocopies.html Heather Morrison