Standardized Pricing Models - Periodicals

["Audrey Bondar" <abondar1@sladen.hfhs.org>]

I'm just about finished renewing our journal subscriptions for 
2007.  Each year I do this it becomes more complicated by the 
number of ways the various publishers establish pricing for their 
subscriptions.  Gone are the good old days of individual price 
and institutional price with a few offering student pricing.  A 
quick decision could be made based on the information provided. 
This lead me to think about consistency.

A great deal of progress has been made with usage statistics. 
COUNTER compliant reports are available from more publishers and 
becoming somewhat of an industry standard. 
http://www.projectcounter.org/

Licensing models available from http://www.licensingmodels.com/ 
These standard licenses can be a useful reference for anyone 
dealing with electronic resource licensing.

All this being said, it brought me to the thought of standardized 
pricing models.  Could the basic methods of subscription price 
determination be simplified to 4 or 5 different methods?  For 
example, tiered pricing.  It seems that a fair number of 
publishers use this method of determining renewal costs but Tier 
1 with one publisher can be very different from Tier 1 of another 
publisher.  Could a standard be established that would be 
workable for both publishers and libraries?  FTE renewals are 
frequently done but the criteria varies widely for this too. 
Basically this would be looking at the most frequently used 
methods of renewal and seeing if a generic schedule of some sort 
could be developed.  Certainly not a simple project but one that 
would make selecting and renewing journals much easier.

Any thoughts?

Audrey Bondar
Senior Information Resource Specialist
Henry Ford Hospital
Sladen Library
Detroit, MI  48202






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