The Journal team have been following the discussion of the introduction of
individual subscriptions to Internet Archaeology with considerable
interest.
The majority of comments so far appear to accept that it is reasonable for
the journal to seek to recover its production costs, but many have
questioned the scale of charges. I'd like to attempt to address this
question.
We have certainly been concerned that 40 GBP might seem expensive compared
to other archaeology journals, although it should be remembered that this
is actually less than 20GBP per issue - which *is* comparable.
Nonetheless, in determining this rate the Journal Steering Committee spent
a long time looking at alternative pricing structures and business plans.
In an ideal world we would have preferred to have more readers at a lower
unit price, but the maintenance of each subscription carries its own fixed
costs; the lower the subscription, the proportion of it recovered by the
journal is reduced. Unfortunately this applies particularly to the
suggested pay-per-view or the pay-by-paper models. As a small academic
project developing as an e-business, our projections suggest that much of
the revenue gained by these methods might be absorbed by the system
maintenance costs. Nonetheless this is new territory for all of us and we
will certainly continue to monitor our pricing policy. We can't guarantee
that it won't change in response to changing circumstances.
On the specific question of reduced student rates, we would have loved to
provide this, but couldn't develop a mechanism for validating subscribers.
Our aim is that most registered students should be able to access the
journal at no cost to them via their institution's subscription. This is
already true for 90% of UK Archaeology departments. We are also keen to
build up our institutional subscribers from the rest of the World. For its
first five years Internet Archaeology was effectively paid for by UK
Higher Education under the eLib programme, and provided a quality product
to the rest of the world for free. If more overseas institutions
subscribed it would allow their staff and students to have free access,
and allow us to keep individual subscription rates down for the rest of
our readers.
Internet Archaeology is an independent not-for-profit enterprise, and if
we can bring in the revenue stream that we need to keep going then any
further income can be used to either reduce subscriptions or develop the
journal and provide more content (preferably the latter).
There are lots of questions here and once again Internet Archaeology finds
itself - somewhat reluctantly this time - at the forefront of culture
change. I hope that this has helped to explain the rationale, at least as
we see it. We're certainly open to the views of all our readers, so
continue to send your comments.
Julian Richards
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Dr Julian D. Richards Tel: +44 1904 433930
Co-Director, Internet Archaeology Fax: +44 1904 433902
Department of Archaeology Email: [log in to unmask]
University of York
The King's Manor
York, YO1 7EP, UK
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