In general, I’m not opposed to a usage based component to a price but as Melissa mentioned we need price stability. I would also
say that there needs to transparency about how their usage is calculated and how exactly the pricing is derived from that use. If it’s a multi-year deal the usage component should only affect the initial price for year one with subsequent years being locked
into known prices. Our budgets are simply not nimble enough to counter large swings in price from year to year.
Back to the issue at hand: I use cost per use all the time. It’s a good metric for letting folks get at least some idea of the value
of a particular subscription. Just one caution about cost per use - and it may have been mentioned earlier and I missed it – make sure you know what counts as a use. Especially for e-books use can be more than a little tricky.
Ian Gibson, MISt
Collections Librarian
Brock University | James A. Gibson Library
Niagara Region | 500 Glenridge Ave. | St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1
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From: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LISTSERV.NASIG.ORG]
On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Monday, June 1, 2015 8:56 AM
To: SERIALST@LISTSERV.NASIG.ORG
Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Cost Per Use Statistics
We use it all the time for both individual journals and for entire databases, including A&I databases (for which we expect a lower cost per use than full text of course).
That said, we need to be careful that we don't open ourselves to accusations of hypocrisy by vendors/publishers. For instance, ACS a couple of years ago wanted to introduce usage into their
pricing model for our national consortium (I'm in Canada), and our consortial office vociferously objected (with the support of the library directors). I had a private conversation with one of the sales reps, who challenged me on that point, as I had to admit
that we use usage for determining value for cancellation, so how is it unfair for the vendors to use usage for determining value for pricing?
I don't have a good answer to that and the only answer I've heard here is that it isn't a question of fairness, but just budget reality, that we simply can't handle costs fluctuating wildly
from one year to another if researchers suddenly use one product much more or less than normal in any given year.
Melissa Belvadi
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:10 PM, Jason Skoog <jaskooglists@gmail.com> wrote: