Re: Article based subscription

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

I have some preliminary figures based upon our '99 reshelving statistics.
Note that these are only a few values selected to show the range. A
complete list, with a full analysis and comparison with the citation data
for Princeton will be available this winter.

Title				Publ.		
		Articles	CCC Cost	Total art	Subscription

Analytical biochemistry		Acad P		  
		226		$30		$6790		 $2310

Applied & envir. microbiol. AMS			  
		128		$ 4		$ 512		 $ 347

Archives of virology		Springer	   
		24	 	$25		$ 600		 $2026

Archives of biochem & biophys Acad P	   
		62		$30		$1860		 $2999

Biochemical journal	Biochem Soc,UK 
		90		$8.50		$ 765		 $2090

Biochem biophys res comm	Acad P		  
		164		$30		$4920		 $2545

Biochim biophys acta		Elsevier	  
		242		$20		$4840		$10569

Biosystems	Elsevier		
		8		$20		$ 160		 $1496


I have picked these from the same general subject area. Note that I've given
the CCC cost, which is sometimes different from that given in the journal;
I've also assumed that will be the total per article cost for an article based
pricing scheme; though I think that neither necessary nor desirable, I have no
other consistent basis to cite. 

This is a fairly busy and large biology library, though not one of the
busiest or the largest. The primary users are our 30 Molec. Bio. dept.
faculty research groups, with an avg. of 10 research staff and students
each.

--
David Goodman
Biology Librarian, and
Co-Chair, Electronic Journals Task Force
Princeton University Library
dgoodman@princeton.edu         http://www.princeton.edu/~biolib/
phone: 609-258-3235            fax: 609-258-2627

______________________

Sloan, Bernie wrote:
> 
> 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