0.7 Subscription options and pricing  (Page 7/10)

The cost of marketing and administering a tiered pricing model—even where suitable—might reduce the net incremental revenue benefit to the society. Unless a society outsources sales and fulfillment of its journal to a publishing services provider, it may find that pricing by distribution medium serves the society’s needs without the added administrative cost of a tiered pricing model.

Pay-per-view pricing

Online distribution makes sales of individual journal articles technically and economically viable. According to one survey of scholarly publishers, over 75% of nonprofit publishers, irrespective of size, offered pay-per-view (PpV) access, although less than 20% of small- and medium-sized nonprofit publishers that offer PpV consider it a significant source of revenue. Cox and Cox (2008), 32-33. PpV distribution requires that the journal has ecommerce functionality, either through its online publishing system or via an online fulfillment service (e.g., Ingenta or JSTOR).

Although pay-per-view pricing has the potential to cannibalize some marginal institutional subscriptions, the risk appears to be relatively low. Admittedly, both of these assertions are largely intuitive. There are no publicly available empirical studies that examine the effect of PpV sales on individual or institutional subscriptions. At the same time, current institutional library purchase behavior (described in the next paragraph) prefers fixed pricing. For a journal with an institutional subscription price of $250, and a relatively low price of $15 per article, A JSTOR survey in mid-2006 (cited in Guthrie, Griffiths, and Maron (2008), 26) indicated that PpV prices ranged from $7 to $39 per article. institutions anticipating more than seventeen downloads per year would be better served by a subscription.

At this point, most academic librarians do not consider pay-per-view an attractive alternative to electronic site licenses, due to the unpredictability of cost and the burden imposed on end users. Also, libraries tend to reject models that might involve them policing usage or restricting access. See Rightscom, Ltd. (2005), 16-17. A joint library-publisher study is currently evaluating potential usage-based pricing models that would allow a library to convert from PpV to a subscription model once it reaches a specified usage threshold. Under such a model, a publisher might set the price for such a converted subscription at a premium over the standard subscription price. For the initial report of the JISC-sponsored study, see Rightscom (2005). For a description of the subsequent field testing of the model, see Hardwood and Prior (2008.)

Open access

The business approaches described in this guide allow a society to operate a subscription-based publishing program efficiently, thus allowing it to remain (or become) financially self-sustaining. At the same time, alternatives to traditional subscription models exist, and an overview of online journal pricing needs to include a discussion of “open access” distribution.