RE: FTE-based pricing

["John McDonald" <jmcdonald@library.caltech.edu>]

I disagree.

Every academic research library in the nation already negotiates 
nearly every single year with nearly every single publisher.  If 
not individually then in small collectives.  Or we use vendors 
who have to dig out pricing information from publishers and match 
that to the relevant demographic data required for the hundreds 
of pricing models already in place.  How many FTE do you have? 
Not including staff? Including only those in particular subjects? 
What's your Carnegie class?  Do you have a med school?  etc. and 
so on.

Usage based pricing is closer than you think.  In fact, we have a 
number of publishers already using it - namely Society publishers 
where usage pricing is a positive and beneficial way to 
distribute costs across subscribers.  There are only a few issues 
to address before using these types of models:

1. Standard usage statistics (and a way to audit them)

2. A balance against excessive or minimal usage (for both 
publishers and libraries)

3. A process for adjusting pricing from year to year

4. Agreement on price per use (reasonable for both publishers and 
libraries)

#1 is nearly done, although auditing of publisher statistics should be
performed at the local level
#2 is easy to accomplish in a number of ways (see Science's tiered usage
bands for an example)
#3 is easy to do, just look at Toby's logical example from the previous
message
#4 is the hard part

Small publishers that can't collectively bargain with individual 
subscribers will adopt the pricing policies and models in use by 
big publishers.  They did it with online journal publishing and 
licensing models in the recent past.

Thanks,

John McDonald
Acquisitions Librarian
California Institute of Technology

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Gottlieb
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 4:19 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: FTE-based pricing

Toby's proposal is quite logical. However quite impractical. It 
calls for the publisher to negotiate, monitor and periodically 
adjust the contract terms for every institutional subscription. 
Additional staff of one to three moderately competent staffers to 
manage a single journal. Now consider that a given publisher 
might have 10-30-50, or in the case of the giants, hundreds of 
journals.All of these costs will affect pricing negatively. Won't 
happen.

Dick Gottlieb
Grey House