Following on from part 2 [PS: excerpt blogged here], I thought I'd ask a couple more questions about price-per-use, based on the online usage stats in the UCOSC dataset....
In 2003, only 1001 online uses [of Elsevier's Nuclear Physics B] were reported to UC by the publisher, but the 2004 list price was $15,360. The companion journal Nuc Phys A is not much better, $10,121 for 1198 uses. Compare that with Nature, 286125 uses at just $1,280!
It gets worse, too, because I'm led to believe that anything that appears in a physics journal these days is available ahead of time from the arXiv....I did go through the latest [Nuc Phys B] table of contents (Vol 813 issue 3) on the Science Direct page, and was easily able to find every paper in the arXiv....which leads me to wonder why any library would buy Nuc Phys B (or Nuc Phys A, assuming it's also covered by the arXiv). Prices haven't improved in the intervening 5 years, either....
That got me wondering how the rest of the journals are distributed by price/use and publisher....
[N]ot only does NPG boast some of the lowest prices and highest use rates, they are the closest of all the publishers to pricing their wares according to (at least one measure of) likely utility....
Next, I broke the data out into intervals....The majority of the titles fall into the first few price/use intervals, say less than about $6/use. Since most pay-per-view article charges are between $25 and $40, I more-or-less arbitrarily picked $30/use as a cutoff and asked how many titles from each publisher fall above that cutoff, and what proportion of the total expenditure (viz, list price sum) does that represent? The inset shows that 161 titles, most of them from Kluwer and Springer (whose figures I combined because Springer bought most of Kluwer's titles sometime after 2003), account for about 5% of the total in list price terms. That was a bit more useful, so I expanded it to ask the same question for each interval....
What becomes apparent now, I think, is that the UC librarians are doing a good job! Only 6% of the total number of journals (5% of the total list price cost) fall into the "more than $30/use" category, of which it could reasonably be said that the library might as well drop the subscription and just cover the pay-per-view costs of their patrons. Only a further 15% or so work out to more than $6/use, and around 80% of the collection (figured as titles or cost) comes in under $6/use, with around 30% less than $1/use.
So, are these reasonable prices -- $1 per use, $6 per use? I'm not sure I can, but I'll try to say something about that question, using the UCOSC dataset, in Part 4.
...Usage-based pricing is a harmful model for scholarly communication, a concept I have written about in-depth in this book chapter. One reason is that usage-based pricing inevitably discourages use. Usage-based pricing is a good model for dealing with scarce resources (e.g., per-page charges for photocopying), but a bad model for scholarship in electronic form (think tax on reading after the first copy, there is virtually no cost to further dissemination). Happily, since I wrote this book chapter in 2005, we have witnessed the Dramatic Growth of Open Access. This presents some interesting opportunities for libraries dealing with the current economic crisis. If you have resources where pricing is based on usage, why not promote open access resources? Perhaps this will decrease usage of the paid subscription, so that your library can move to a lower pricing tier the following year....
Bill Hooker also points out that there are a few journals at U Cal (e.g., some Elsevier journals), where the subscription cost is not that much different from what pay-per-use would cost. If methods like these were employed at U Cal, could the balance be tipped so that U Cal would clearly save money by switching to pay-per-use? Without open access, this would clearly be a harm to scholarly communication. However, with open access, this could be a catalyst to further change. If the monies saved were redirected to support for open access, this could further decrease the need to use expensive resources, resulting in further savings which can then be redirected to more open access support, creating a positive open access cycle, in counter to the negative cycle of the pricing crisis. The publisher could react by increasing their pay-per-use price. For U Cal, this could be a bit of a dilemma; but on the other hand, it would decrease the probability of success of the pay-per-use model, thus avoiding a harm to scholarship.
Update (3/17/09). Also see Part 4 of Bill Hooker's inquiry.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
