Re: Article based subscription

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Karen Hunter, Senior Vice President at Elsevier Science, sends the
following message in response to Joanna Tousley-Escalante's inquiry about
the PEAK project and how it has impacted Elsevier's licensing options.

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To liblicense-l:

Joanna Tousley-Escalante asked whether Elsevier was now, as a result
of the PEAK experiment, negotiating licenses on the basis of a set
number of articles.  Good question and the answer is slightly more com-
plicated than a simple yes or no.

First, the PEAK experiment just ended August 31.  So we do not know
the results yet.  We had some mid-course results to look at earlier this
year, but we all still have to analyze the data from the full experiment.  I
hope that will be done between now and the end of the year.

Having said that, there were clear benefits that many PEAK participants
saw in the article access option.  Therefore, for the PEAK participants we 
have worked to give them options in making a transition to our ScienceDirect
program that will preserve their access to the whole database.  It is not
at this stage the same model as was tested in PEAK, but it achieves most
of the same results.  We are doing some other things with non-PEAK
customers to also increase their access to the entire database.

There are a number of ideas we want to consider from PEAK, including 
the notion that once an article has been "bought", it is permanently available
to the whole authorized community at that school.  This is an intriguing
notion, described to me as building a collection one article at a time.

As I recently said to PEAK libraries, for Elsevier PEAK is in some ways
just beginning.  We intend to very seriously evaluate the results and
I expect you will hear more in the future.

Karen Hunter
Senior Vice President 
Elsevier Science
k.hunter@elsevier.com