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Re: Charging more for remote access 

[MOD. NOTE:  Anyone know of other publishers -- govt. or not -- that are
charging based on numbers and types of subnets?]

Mary Engle wrote:

>One situation we recently encountered in which the vendor wants more 
>money for wider access (which can be interpreted as home use) is this: 
>
>A government agency making its data available electronically has chosen to

Only one that I know of is STAT-USA - are there others?  I would like to
know.  There are many issues besides the IP licensing scheme - As Univ of
Mich has shut down its gopher mirror of this data, it is now unaccessible.
We are a govt. depository library, but when I asked our library to inquire
about our supposedly FREE ACCESS, we were told that there could be ONE
machine in the library which could gain the FREE ACCESS (provided to govt.
depositories).

Please let me know if any other govt. agency is charging, and/or charging
in this way.

On the pricing issue, it would be similar to having charges by number of
students, faculty, books in the collection, or any other measure. 
STAT-USA changed its pricing from $76,800 (circa late 1984)  for a class B
network (256*300) to $2500 for a class B network. 

My guess is that you might have had the same charges (for educational
institutions) if you charged $300 for <2000 students and $2500
for > 2000 students. (just an example, make up your own price schedule).

On STAT-USA side of things, one class C license is $350 versus $150 per
individual account, and one class B license is $2500 which is by their
pricing is 8 Class C licenses (5*350 + 3*250).  Since access is via the
network, - A class B license is 16 2/3 individual accounts and they might
have done something like 'simultaneous users' and 16 would cost $2500. 

On measuring simultaneous users, via HTTP protocol, you would have to have
some sort of average number of users/hits per time period since the
connections are very short duration.  But that would make an accounting
nightmare.  They could charge by other size measures and probably they
just have not thought about it carefully.

I would guess that STAT-USA might think about charging $2500 per 'campus'
or some such, or cut some other deal for EDUCATIONAL institutions, which
they seem to lump together with their other customers who make $$$ by
reading and using their services. 

Bob
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