RE: FTE-based pricing

["Morgan, James J" <morganj@iupui.edu>]

One popular variant of usage-based pricing has been concurrent 
use.  At least in the medical world we have such licenses with 
Ovid, Stat!Ref, Harrisons, and others.  I've found these licenses 
to be much less subject to the volatility mentioned below.

I don't think I can explain it mathematically, but I think that 
queuing theory (and common sense) demonstrates that a 2 c.u. 
license can accommodate many more users than a 1 c.u. license, 
and so on as the numbers get larger.

The only times we have problems with these licenses in training 
situations where the instructor asks the whole class to login at 
once, and usually vendors have exceptions for those situations.

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Rita Scheman
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 7:14 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: FTE-based pricing

Given the nature of the comments in this thread, I am wondering: 
Has any organization provided, or considered providing 
alternatives by offering usage-based and FTE-based pricing 
systems?  Or combinations thereof with a fixed pricing system?

Rita Scheman
Scheman Consulting
www.schemanconsulting.com


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony
Watkinson
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 11:33 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: FTE-based pricing

I would like to complement what Mary has written. It does seem to
me that usage-based charging is in principle fair but I cannot
see that it will work because the volatility of demand makes this
approach unworkable for either publishers or librarians who have
to budget - and do not all of us have to do that? The work at
CIBER (www.publishing.ucl.ac.uk) has exposed surprising levels of
volatility of use institution by year (a surprise to me at any
rate). I do not think we have published this because it was a
side-observation that we have not been able to follow up but to
me it is rather significant and important in this debate.

Anthony Watkinson