0.7 Subscription options and pricing  (Page 10/10)

Institutional deposit mandates

In addition to funder mandates, there has been a gradual increase in institutional deposit mandates. Although the specifics vary by institution, institutional mandates grant an author’s host institution permission to make available the faculty member’s scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles, effectively granting the institution a non-exclusive license to distribute the article online. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently became the first U.S. faculty to mandate online deposit in an institutional repository. See (External Link) . However, there are currently about a dozen such mandates worldwide. See (External Link) .

Consortia sales and aggregations

Consortia sales, and participation in bundled collections and aggregations, raise a variety of issues pertaining to pricing, market coverage, primary subscription retention, and royalty or revenue allocations. The overview below should provide a society with perspective on the types of issues it is likely to confront. Other issues germane to participating in an online aggregation are described in Chapter Six.

Consortia and aggregation pricing

Participation in consortia sales programs and online journal aggregations can expand a journal’s reach into institutions that did not subscribe to the journal previously. However, for such participation to increase the journal’s net revenue it is necessary that the aggregator’s pricing protects the journal’s existing revenue base, and/or the incremental revenue generated offsets any revenue lost through discounting existing subscriptions (see “Online Access and Print Substitution,” in Chapter Four).

While publishers price titles for consortia sales in a variety of ways, there are two basic approaches:

• Base-plus pricing, which prices a journal based on the consortium’s previous (typically print) holdings. For example, if a journal currently generates $20,000 in subscription revenue from consortium members, then the price for the entire consortium will represent an incremental percentage on top of the base amount.
• Bundle discount pricing, which prices the offer as a volume discount off the total price of the participating titles. In this case, an aggregator offers groups of titles—often by subject category—at a discount, based on the number of journals in the bundle. The bundles sometimes include both a publisher’s own titles, as well as those licensed from other publishers, including societies.

Base-plus pricing is conservative in protecting a journal’s existing revenue, although the approach may forgo incremental revenue in the interest of that protection. Further, as it is based on a consortium’s holdings at a given time, such a pricing approach is inherently transitional and becomes unworkable as the collection or consortium grows. Dryburgh (2004) analyzes pricing approaches for journal aggregations based on interviews with eight publishers.

A bundled discount approach, as it does not reference the consortium’s previous holdings and spending level, may place a journal’s existing institutional revenue base at some risk. The extent of that risk will typically depend on the basis for the revenue allocation for the bundle (see below), as well as any protections or guarantees that the publisher offers to mitigate a journal’s initial risk in order to encourage participation.

Publishers typically combine other pricing criteria—including the number of participating institutions, total FTEs, and institution type—with these two basic approaches. Most publishers offer multiple pricing options for aggregations, suggesting continuing experimentation with consortia pricing models. For a breakdown of current consortium pricing practices by nonprofit publishers, see Cox and Cox (2008), 52-55.

Revenue allocation

Revenue allocations to individual titles from bundled sales are often based on usage, volume of content, individual title price (decreasingly), or some combination. The volume of content a journal makes available to the bundle helps drive the perceived value of the bundle over all (for example, in terms of number of articles or volume years in the collection). Using individual title prices has become less prevalent; although it protects journals with high prices, it doesn’t necessary align with the value-in-use perceived in the collection. The approach used will reflect the particular composition of each bundle, as well as the policies and approach of each publisher or aggregator.

In the case of a mature or niche journal, any aggregator claims to generating revenue from new core market subscriptions should be treated cautiously. If the aggregation is being offered to a specific, well-defined market not previously reached by the journal (for example, corporate or public library sales), or if the consortial market comprises institutions of a type not previously reached by the journal (e.g., small colleges or international institutions), then the effect—and the implications—are largely the same as those for tiered pricing. If a journal is relatively new and does not need to protect an existing print subscription base, the society may be in a position to be more aggressive in reaching markets.

Although a society is not obligated to include its journal in consortial deals or aggregations, many commercial publishers will encourage such participation, as the institutional market continues to exhibit a preference for consortial purchases of online journal aggregations. Whether an aggregation arrangement represents an equitable deal for the society inevitably depends on a host of variables that can only be assessed on a individual basis.