Re: PEAK

[Wendy Lougee <wlougee@umich.edu>]

	Given the recently expressed interest in the University of 
Michigan's PEAK (Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge) project, let me 
provide a general overview of the effort for the Liblicense list.   PEAK 
is a collaborative effort at the University of Michigan involving 
librarians, technologists, and economists.  I serve as project director, 
the research group is lead by Prof. Jeff MacKie-Mason from the Department 
of Economics and the School of Information, and John Price-Wilkin (Head 
of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service) manages the service.  
PEAK builds on the cooperative efforts with Elsevier begun in the TULIP 
project.

	PEAK is a fixed term project (currently slated to end August 
1999) which is both a journal delivery service and a field trial dealing 
with journal pricing and products. As a service, the University of 
Michigan serves as a host for all 1100 journals of Elsevier and provides 
access both to the University of Michigan community and approximately a 
dozen other PEAK participant institutions.  The service uses 
search/access software developed by the University of Michigan for the 
earlier Elsevier TULIP project and provides both structured and full text 
search capabilities. 

	As a research project, PEAK is exploring several pricing 
dimensions, including different product bundles as well as nonlinear 
pricing opportunities afforded by electronic access.  While traditional 
journals have familiar bundling conventions (e.g., articles bundled into 
issues, bundled into volumes, within a specific title), electronic access 
allows us to conceive of new types of bundles and new pricing options for 
those bundles. After extensive discussions with library collection 
experts and potential participants, the project team decided to explore 
three different product/price options.  The first two options mirror the 
best-known traditional options; the third choice is novel:

1.	Per article-individual users can purchase unlimited access to a 
specific article for a fixed price.

 2.	Traditional subscriptions-Institutional and individual users can 
purchase unlimited access to a set of articles that corresponds to 
Elsevier print-on-paper journal titles. 

3.	Generalized subscriptions-Institutional users (e.g., libraries) 
can purchase unlimited access to sets (or "subscriptions") of 120 
articles selected after the fact by users. 

One important, and somewhat unusual feature of the per article and 
generalized subscription options, is that the user purchases access to 
the article for the life of the project.  This is not a "per drink" model 
in which the user or institution has to pay each time an article is 
viewed.  Once an article is acquired through an institution's generalized 
subscription (by being used by an individual user), all authorized users 
may access that article an unlimited number of times for the duration of 
the project.  This makes the generalized subscription function like a 
"u-pick-em" subscription: the institution commits to obtain a number of 
articles, but those which are of sufficient interest to be first 
requested by users are the articles that are bundled into the "subscription."
 
	Nonlinear pricing refers to a broad class of schemes in which revenue 
increases nonlinearly.  Like bundling, nonlinear pricing may fit well in 
the world of electronic publishing since recovery of fixed publishing 
costs can be spread over more revenue-generating products due to the new 
services that can be created.  PEAK's nonlinear pricing includes a 
participation fee, followed by product charges for the various options 
purchased (each institution is offered a different set of price/product 
options). The base participation fee also provides participants with 
unlimited search access to the entire database and free access to 
articles from 1996.  As the second year of the project begins (January 
1999), articles from 1997 become free, and access to all products 
purchased in 1998 is sustained without incremental charge. 

	Participating institutions receive detailed usage reports (note 
that individual user identities are not revealed).  Aggregate, 
institutional level usage data are provided to Elsevier. The PEAK 
research group will be analyzing the usage data, the purchasing data, and 
the data collected from user and librarian surveys.  The results of these 
analyses will be made publicly available through our web site and through 
scholarly publications. We expected to host a conference on the topic of 
electronic access to scholarly publishing as well. 

Additional information about the project can also be found at:
www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/peak/

Wendy P. Lougee
PEAK Project Director

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Wendy P. Lougee                               voice:  734-764-8016
Asst. Director, Digital Library Initiatives   fax:    734-763-5080
University of Michigan Library                e-mail: wlougee@umich.edu
818 Hatcher South                 
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1205      http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wlougee/        
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