Dear All

Here is a further response from BMJ re: pricing of e-journals, sent in
response to some member's recent comments. 

RE: BMJ Publishing Institutional Policy for 2001

We understand your concern about our new pricing structure and agree
that not all staff and students will want to access our journals online.

We chose FTE as a measure because it is the fairest and simplest way to
define institutions by size. It is nearly impossible to determine who
would be included or excluded as clinical FTE eg. all medical students
or just the 3rd and 4th year?

Even if we had gone that way, the prices would be the same. The bands
would just be smaller ie. a small institution would probably be up to
200 clinical FTE rather than up to 2000 FTE. An institution with 20001+
FTEs would still be classified as Extra Large with 2000+ clinical FTEs.
However, some of our journals also appeal to readers outside the
clinical arena eg. Occupational and Environmental Medicine or Tobacco
Control, and Journal of Medical Ethics (online from February 2001).

A Print and Online subscription for a extra large institution costs
600/$960 and if used by 2000 medical staff and students will cost only
30 pence/46 cents per user/year including access on- and off site. Even
if only half of them access the journal, the cost will still be under
1/$1 per user/year.  We hope you will agree that this is a competitive
pricing model.

We believe this is a fair model which takes into account that small
institutions with small budgets shouldn't have to pay the same price as
bigger institutions.

With regard to providing online archives, there is no long term solution
yet and right now publishers simply cannot guarantee any access to their
archives be it for free or not. BMJ is working towards a solution that
is workable for both the institutions and the publisher.

The HighWire Press have been working on access to usage statistics for
institutions on the BMJ journals for some time and this feature should
be made available on the journal sites very soon.

We are sorry to hear that there were problems with access to some of our
journals through Ingenta. We are currently reviewing our working
relationship with Ingenta and will look into this.

Best regards,
Eunice Walford


Melvin Morbey
E-Journals Co-ordinator/Liaison Librarian for AMS and PRIS
University of Reading Library
Whiteknights PO Box 223	
Reading RG6 6AE	

Tel : (internal) 8779
Tel : (external) 0118 9318779
Fax : 0118 9316636
E-mail : [log in to unmask]	










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