Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, January 16, 2004

Computing the cost-per-reading of an OA article

Jonas Holmström, The Cost per Article Reading of Open Access Articles, D-Lib Magazine, January 2004. Abstract: "The measure for calculating cost per reading (CPR) of journal articles is reviewed, and a way to adapt this measure to articles in open access journals is proposed. The traditional subscription based publishing model is compared with the open access model, and similarities are identified and used when calculating CPR for the two different types of publishing. Challenges with interpreting statistics are discussed as well as the difficulty of estimating the number of readings from the number of downloaded articles. Finally, the potential use and implications of the CPR measure for open access publishers and institutions are discussed."

Update. Jan Velterop, publisher of BioMed Central, has posted a response to SOAF.