RE: Usage-based pricing, a view

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

Our anonymous contributor does make some good points, and also, I think,
some bad ones:

> 1) economic disincentive to usage, and so antithetical to both publishers'
> and librarians' missions;

Use-based charges are only a disincentive when the user is paying the
charges.  If the library is paying and the cost is transparent to the
user, no such disincentive exists.

> 2) incentive toward 'bad' behaviors, either to reduce usage or to 'hide'
> it in some way

Again, the pricing scenario we're talking about would only lead to this
sort of abuse if the user is paying directly.

> 3) likely to stir up debates and administrative hassles about what kind of
> usage should 'count' - Abstracts? Searches? The 500th time a particularly
> popular article is viewed? What about the second click to enlarge an
> illustration? Mistakes? Yikes! Seems like a disaster in the making...

Wouldn't the definition of "usage" be settled before access began?  In
most cases, I don't think it would have to be terribly controversial: if
an article is downloaded, the library pays a set fee.  Yes, there could be
complications in particular circumstances.  I'm not sure they'd be
insuperable, though.

> 4) harder to implement beneficial price discrimination and raises other
> fairness issues. OK, so a small research institute has relatively high
> usage, but does that make it fair to charge them the same as Yale? What
> about a big university in a developing country?

The nice thing about per-use charging is that you don't have to worry
about price discrimination so much.  Instead of saying "I think your
school's large student body will impact my system more than the other
school's small student body, so you have to pay more up front," the
publisher can simply say "Five bucks an article.  Buy what you want."  
This is, in fact, the exact opposite of price discrimination.  But if a
publisher does want to give a particular type of customer a price break (a
library in a developing country, for example), there's no reason why it
can't do so on the same per-use basis.

> 5) a good bet is that corporate customers of many key scientific titles do
> NOT use anywhere near as heavily as universities or research institutions.
> Usage-based pricing will lay bare the fundamental 'unfairness' of a dual
> pricing scheme designed to charge corporate customers more.

So the argument is "We'd better not do X because it would lay bare the
unfairness of dual pricing"?  I'm not sure that's a very powerful
argument.

> 6) what to do about first year pricing.

Welcome to the wonderful world of reasonable risk.  It's what libraries
undertake every time they shell out huge amounts of money for products
that they think will probably be of great use to their patrons, but aren't
sure. This is a risky marketplace.  It's not the job of librarians to
remove risk from publishers' experience.

> 7) the unpredictability of year to year pricing.

This is a good point.  But then, there are worse things than
unpredictability.  Those things include predictability, when what is
predictable is unreasonable.

-------------
Rick Anderson
Director of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu