Re: National Online: Nature and Others... (like SCIENCE)

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

Michael, I am not objecting here to your pricing policies. I am
objecting to your restricted access, which is not merely useless
because:

> [you] can hardly expect to get more than a trivial number of
> additional electronic personal subscribers by adding access to such
> a small amount of material. and are merely annoying the majority of
> your electronic users, who use the library subscriptions; people
> will be most unlikely to decide to become members on this basis 
> alone.

but unethical, as I explained again in a posting a little earlier today. 

Let me mention that the representative of one of the other publishers
mentioned in my presentation responded the following day by saying that
they had not realized the effects of their policy, and would plan to
change it at least partially.  (I don't think I should say which until
they actually do change it.)

(Both this and the preceding posting are modified excerpts from
http://www.princeton.edu/~biolib/dg/Natureand.html which is a somewhat
expanded and revised version of my talk at National Online on May 15) --

David Goodman
Biology Librarian and Co-chair, Electronic Journals Task force
Princeton University Library
Princeton, NJ 08544-0001
e-mail: dgoodman@princeton.edu

____

Michael Spinella wrote:

> David et al,
> 
> Rick is certainly correct here, and doesn't need my help to strengthen his
> rebuttal. But, lest anyone think that the evidence he offers is merely
> anecdotal (i.e. peculiar to his one data point at UNR), I will offer a
> couple of metrics that apply broadly across our whole file of Science
> Online subscribers and institutions:
> 
> 1) The average cost that institutions paid in 2000 for site-wide Science
> Online is around 34 cents per fte. Large universities and consortia, on
> average, do a little better than that, while very small institutions and
> corporations do somewhat worse. No institution of any kind pays anywhere
> near what our members pay in dues, or even what they pay incrementally for
> Science Online access.
> 
> 2) Maybe you will say, "But wait...not all FTEs are really ever going to
> use Science Online in a given year." True enough. But Science does appeal
> to a rather wide swath of users across most academic campuses, and so we
> (and you) enjoy very substantial usage figures. It's hard to know exactly
> how many unique users there are in a year, but when we estimate
> conservatively how many different individuals seem to have been served
> through institutions in 2000, the cost per effective user during that year
> would still have been well under $4, which is still a very modest fraction
> of what our members pay, even excluding their dues payments and only
> looking at the increment they pay extra for Science Online access. And the
> average among universities would certainly be much lower even than this
> <$4 figure, because corporations are included in this overall calculation.
> On average, corporations have many fewer USERS per the number of FTEs, and
> therefore are paying a relatively higher per user rate than universities
> even in the same pricing tier.
> 
> Mike Spinella
> Science
> 
> >>> rickand@unr.edu 05/17/01 07:19PM >>>
> > Rick, you have it backwards. The library, who pays the most (on the order
> > of several thousand dollars, gets the version without the in-press
> > articles. The individual subscriber, who pays much less, gets the version
> > with the in-press articles.
> 
> No.  The library pays a larger invoice than an individual does, but the
> library is not an individual subscriber -- at UNR, it represents about
> 13,000 users, none of whom has paid anything approaching the cost of an
> individual subscription.  In the case of Science: if a student at UNR opts
> to spend $77 and subscribe on her own, she gets her own weekly print copy
> and online access to pre-publication content (she pays more, and she gets
> more).  If she opts to spend nothing, and settle for access through the
> library, she has to share a print copy with her compadres and settle for
> less-current online access (she pays less, and she gets less).  There is
> nothing scandalous about this; in fact, I think I'll go out on a limb and
> say that the library and its community get a pretty good deal here --
> given that each community member's access costs us about 27 cents.  The
> fact that an individual can opt to pay a premium and get a premium service
> doesn't make our deal any less acceptable.
> 
> -------------
> Rick Anderson
> Electronic Resources/Serials Coordinator
> The University Libraries
> University of Nevada, Reno