ELECTRONIC JOURNALS: PRICING MODELS

Electronic journals (as distinct from electronic editions of hard-copy periodicals) are now moving
into mainstream thinking, and discussion is growing both on their real costs (see Scholarly Journals
at the Crossroads) and on how they are to be paid for by those using them. This paper is concerned
with the second issue,. I write as a librarian involved with one of the U.K. E-Lib Electronic Journal
projects. While some of the new electronic journals becoming available may be subsidised in some
way at this early stage, all of them will eventually have to obtain revenue to cover their costs at some
stage, i.e. they will have to establish an "exit strategy". My perception is that new journal projects
are addressing this issue, if at all, on an individual basis. These notes are based on informal
discussions, but are intended generalize and stimulate the debate.

1.   An electronic journal will have software and hardware costs of some kind, and will also have
     editorial costs associated with the process of gathering material and bringing it together to
     form the electronic product, even if these are explicitly or implicitly subsidised.

     Possible revenue streams might be -
          
    Institutional subscriptions
    Personal subscriptions
    National site licenses
    Publication subventions, e.g. grants for publication, page charges.
    pay-per-access
    pay-per-delivery
  
2.   The current generation of web servers has a great deal of flexibility in dealing with
     controlling access to information and the management of financial transactions (although
     there are issues of security). 

     Any software will need to support the restriction of access by IP address or by any
     component of that address. To manage pay-per-access usage, the software would need to
     support credit-card-charging. 

3.   Institutional and personal subscriptions 

     On the conventional model, a subscription is related to the likely size of the market, and this
     will clearly vary. In some cases, the economics of publishing the journal may indicate that a
     significant number of subscriptions is needed to ensure that it is viable. 

     There can be concern that if the volume of institutional subscription is high, then it is possible
     that the volume of individual subscriptions will be low.?????????? One fear of electronic
     publishers is that the multiple access possibilities of electronic journals will eliminate personal
     subscriptions entirely. A possible response  is to consider providing only personal
     subscriptions. This does not seem to be a realistic option, since it does not meet the need of
     the market for multiple use, and flies in the face of network realities. 
     
     One other possibility would be limit the number of access-points from which an institutional
     subscription is accessible, in order to encourage personal subscriptions. An further option
     might be to give personal subscribers access to enhanced issues: these might e.g.access
     software tools to re-work data or access to additional information to contextualise the
     material.

     Focusing on instititutional subscriptions, one possibility sometimes touted is to base these on
     the size of the size of the institution. It would certainly be difficult to make this effective
     within an international marketplace, and would be very difficult to police effectively, apart
     from other, more philosophical, objections. A variant on this would be for institutions/bodies
     to purchase on the basis of "price per user ID", thus allowing an institution to pay in relation
     not to its size, but to its level of interest. How this could be handled administratively is a
     difficult question. 

     A variant on the institutional subscription might be for national/international organizations as
     distinct from institutions to contract for access on behalf of all their members.

     Turning to personal subscribers, one question might be whether personal subscribers be
     limited to accessing the journal from a single machine or from anywhere on the Internet? This
     seems to negate the main point of the exercise which is to free the user from the constraints
     of location.

     These issues indicate the way in which it is difficult to balance the economics of such journals
     with optimizing the use of the technology. Experience suggests that the technological
     capabilities will always win in the end. The relationship of institutional and personal
     subscriptions as we know them is called into question by the electronic journal. 

4.   National/ regional site licensing.

     This is an approach which has become established in the U.K for a number of individual
     publications and with publishers through the Higher Education Funding Councils and
     CHEST. If it was thought of as a possible option, then more work would be needed on
     details. It has been suggested by some librarians that this is likely to provide the easiest
     pattern for institutions. The co-operative element potentially has benefits fro both suppliers
     and purchasers. It also avoids the problem of personal users passing on passwords. If
     negotiated through CHEST, the administration would be less onerous. However, it should be
     remembered that 30% of learned journal content originates outside HE institutions, and their
     readership also extends much wider. In addition, almost all journals would wish to market
     themselves internationally, so such an approach could not possibly suffice on its own .  A
     variation on such an approach which could have wider application than national licensing
     would be individual institutional licences, although this may be no different in reality from a
     conventional institutional subscription with a more explicit set of conditions.

5.   Publication subventions

     In some subjects and countries, there are real possibilities for the support of publishing by the
     bodies which provide financial support for research. Its introduction in other subjects/
     countries might involve a substantial culture change. Page charges are the most common
     form of subvention. While they have tended to become less popular in recent years; the
     possibility of re-introducing them has nevertheless been scouted in the e-mail discussions on
     this topic. The problem with these is that they place emphasis on the wealth of the individual
     or institution rather than the value of what (s)he has to say. In addition, the growing
     emphasis on getting material published in the "right" journal copuld lead to manipulation of
     the system. 
     In principle, there is also the issue of whether public sector institutions should actually pay
     private sector bodies to publish their results: is this an even more extreme example of what
     happens now with the research results being given away and then sold back? 

     Certainly, both a general culture shift would be required for such an approach be adopted,
     and the issue of how economically practical it is would also have to be addressed.

6.   Pay-per-access

     This does not tend to be regarded kindly by librarians, primarily because it seems
     uncontrolled expenditure, but it is being actively discussed as the major alternative to block
     subscriptions, and must therefore be explored in motre detail.  In the age of access, some
     method for providing access to material to which a block subscription/licence has not been
     paid is essential. The idea that the journal issue/volume is simply a print-based form of
     packaging, and that the article rather than the issue/volume is the unit of publication, leads to
     the conclusion that access to the individual "article" is a reasonable way to offer facilities.
     From the publishers' viewpoint, It may also provide an additional source of income, enabling
     subscription prices to be held down and encouraging more subscriptions (there are a lot of
     "ifs" buries in that sentence, but let it stand!).

     In informal discussion, the idea was developed of access to the contents page and to certain
     "tasters" (which might include abstracts) being provided free. Access to the individual articles
     would be available for a variable fee. The fee might depend on timeliness of the data,
     commercial usefulness, popularity (!), complexity and whether or not processing of data on
     the journal server was needed. A table of charges would be maintained to support this.
     Searches to find whether a particular topic was covered in the journal would be free.

     There are attractions to this approach, and it is clearly one which builds on present practice in
     terms of document delivery. There are also issues of principle relating to the concept of fair
     dealing, which are likely to require more extensive discussion in relation to electronic
     publishing generally.        

7.   Pay-per-delivery

     The difference between this approach and the previous model is that the user could get a
     view of the article without paying, but would need to pay to obtain a copy. Questions about
     it are -

    Is it feasible? Is the technology available to make it impossible to download without
       paying? 
    Should a non-subscriber even be able to see the text of an "article"? It is not possible
       in print, so why should it be possible in electronic formats?.
  
  There is a spectrum ranging across the basic bibliographical data, the additiona of an
  abstract, the addition of tasters of fuller data as outlined in 6 above, and the full text. The
  issue is how far along that line should the user be able to go before payment is required.
  
8.   Coverage of subscriptions

     Since journals will be held on a server, access is controlled. The issue arises of what a subscription
     pays for. My discussions suggest that subscribers purchasing an annual subscription would be entitled
     to access issues released during the year for which they had subscribed even if they cancelled the
     subscription. Subscribers who wished to access issues published in years to which they had not
     subscribed could do so by paying per article or by purchasing subscriptions to back issues. This
     would obviously be affected by the total approach to financing the journal.

9.   There is a certain amount of published material on this and related subjects, and no doubt some of
     that will help develop solutions to the issues outlined here. These notes are more informal and reflect
     an ongoing discussion in a particular practical situation.. The issues covered are however general:
     they are relevant to the problems of libraries, but also raise questions about scholarly communication, 
     the economics of electronic journals, and relationships between players in the market. I have
     concentrated on the kind of emerging journals we are now seeing, and have avoided including the
     more radical proposals which flow from the Physics Pre-print Archive approach, and the idea of
     discipline databases. I think that they raise practical issues which the community has to consider, and
     views on them would be useful not only to those involved in the E-Lib Electronic Journal projects,
     but in the whole business of scholarly communication. I am grateful to members of SCONUL's
     Advisory Committee on Scholarly Communication for comments on an earlier draft of this. 

Tom Graham
27 March 1996


 
 
     


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