Re: selling e-articles

["Pippa Smart" <pippa.smart@googlemail.com>]

Selling individual articles - on a pay-per-view basis - is quite 
common, and so far as I am aware, most commercial publishers are 
already doing this. The last information I have on this was that 
sales of individual articles are not huge, but slowly increasing. 
The usual model is that the purchaser is able to open the full 
article for a fixed time after payment - commonly 1 month (or in 
a Nature article I recently purchased, 1 day!)

There are no problems with author rights that I am aware of, 
since the articles are still be sold as a "part" of the original 
publication. The problem that your colleague was thinking of is 
Tasini, a case where the NYT took photographs that it had used in 
one publication, and then created a new database product without 
the permission of the photographers - the problem was the 
creation of a new product.

I am not aware of any publishers selling a package of downloads - 
i.e. setting up an account with a library to download up to a 
maximum number for a fixed price (and cheaper than purchasing 
each one individually) - although some libraries offer this (e.g. 
www.ajol.info and - I think - the British Library).

Pippa Smart
Research Communication and Publishing Consultant
PSP Consulting - www.pspconsulting.org
Skype: pippasmart
pippa.smart@gmail.com
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