Re: Usage-based pricing

[david Jones <d.e.jones@sheffield.ac.uk>]

I do believe that usage based pricing is more equitable in principle and
that it offers benefits to both subscribers and publishers.

My own institution is in the UK JISC band B so where JISC banding is used
we pay somewhere near the top price irrespective of the quantity of use
that we'll make of the resource. This is ok if it's, say, Compendex as we
have a relatively large number of engineering staff and students. But not
if it's a Geology resource because we no longer teach geology though we
have people with an interest who might make a some use of it in cognate
departments like Geography and Civil Engineering.  We won't be subscribing
to any of these (to us) marginal resources because they'll be poor value
at our JISC banding.

The publisher loses out because they might have got some small additional
revenue from us.

Pricing for any year could be based on last year's usage/downloads. An
increase in usage would signal a need to budget for an increased
subscription in the following year.

Alternatively we could be notified when our subscription was exhausted and
buy in additional downloads. We'd need to put aside contingency funds for
this of course.

We allocate resources to departments via a formula in which staff and
student numbers are a factor so this model could link to that process,
where we "accredit" the subscription to a subject specific resource to
that department's share of Library funds. A department grows, makes
greater use of a resource, and funds flow their way to pay for it.

We'd be more inclined to try out new services by perhaps buying a cetain
number of downloads and monitoring demand and interest in it.

The we could get down to the real issue: how much per download are we
paying and what is the competition charging!

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David Jones
Assistant Director for Collections and eServices
University of Sheffield Library
Office: Arts Tower Room 1.13
Tel: 0114 222 7226

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