RE: Article based subscription

["Sloan, Bernie" <bernies@uillinois.edu>]

I think David Goodman's proposal has merit: buy by the drink until you've
paid the equivalent of a subscription, with further articles from that
title being free.

But I wonder how often libraries would hit the "subscription price
threshold"? Don't most studies indicate that it's "cheaper" to pay by the
drink (i.e., in most cases the per article fees don't come close to the
price of a subscription)?

-----Original Message-----
From: David Goodman [mailto:dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU]
Sent: Friday, September 10, 1999 11:34 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Article based subscription


The question of how individual journal articles should be priced is one
that has been relatively little discussed.  It is well known that the
poorest quality journals are proportionately the most expensive, because
of the smaller demand. To what extent this would apply to individual
articles is not clear to me, though certainly some of the publishers
currently with the highest individual article royalties are among the ones
that would usually be considered the lower quality ones.

However, this isnt what I was trying to say. I was trying to say that
there should be no cutoff between deciding to subscribe to a journal, and
deciding to buy it article by article.  We should be able to say, we will
buy it for so much an article until we have paid as much as a subscription
would have cost, and then it should be considered that we have subscribed
and we need pay no more bno matter how much we use it further that year.
This would make the payments reflect the use, not our guesses about use.

David Goodman, Princeton University
Biology Library				 
dgoodman@princeton.edu            
609-258-3235
_____________________________

On Thu, 9 Sep 1999, Paul M. Gherman wrote:

> David Goodman makes the point that articles could be priced differentially
> depending on the cost of the journal they are from. In the PEAK experiment
> each library subscribed to a specific number of articles at the beginning
> of the year in the same way we currently subscribe to a specific set of
> journals. In actuality we found that all libraries over subscribed
> purchasing more articles than their patrons used. But over time, I am sure
> we would all know how to benchmark our individual campus use. Under the
> PEAK system all articles cost the same which made administering the system
> easy.
> 
> 
> Paul M. Gherman