Barbara,

My institution, like some others who’ve already responded, now has several years of experience with PPV dating back to 2010-2011. We cancelled most of our so-called Big Deal packages with Wiley, Elsevier, and Sage over a two year period and began working directly with these three vendors to provide institutional PPV. Wiley and Elsevier support the model we want, which is token-based where you pre-purchase a group of tokens as a sort of deposit account. This is no doubt the same as what some others have referred to. Sage, unfortunately, does not seem to have the transactional infrastructure capabilities to offer this in spite of our repeated pleas for them to move in this direction.

I’ve mentioned our experience several times in various for a but will try to summarize here.

For Wiley and Elsevier, we buy as much token bundles at a time as we can possibly afford, and as you might expect, that helps drive down the per article cost.
These tokens typically expire after a year but we’ve never come anywhere close to losing any tokens.
We made a conscious choice to offer Wiley and Elsevier PPV access in an unmediated way. We don’t have any choice with Sage but to offer mediated access because of their transaction model.
Although mileage may vary between institutions for a wide variety of reasons, the fact checking we’ve been able to do seems to indicate that we are getting a better deal — cheaper per article cost — by going directly to these publishers as opposed to using a third party service like CCC’s Get It Now. Of course, that may change but that’s been our experience for some time.
We recently expanded PPV to include all Nature titles, and early indications are that this is working well. This access, like Wiley and Elsevier, is unmediated.
We’d like to to do even more PPV but some publishers won’t or can’t play ball. They may support individual PPV but not the institutional kind.
NOTE that other than canceling those specific vendor packages some time ago, we are not inherently trying to substitute PPV for subscriptions in all cases. In other words, we continue to have a pretty good portfolio of subscriptions for our size, and even when we have PPV with a particular publisher, we still maintain a selection of individual subscriptions.
Our users clearly love the hugely expanded access to journals (and ebooks in many cases) that these PPV arrangements enable, and are actively making use of it. Usage is growing strongly. At some point we might have to cut back but so far, that hasn’t happened.
There really hasn’t been a great deal of user abuse of this access.
I wanted to point out that we do not retain purchased articles. In most cases, the user has access to download the selected article for 24 hours and that’s it. They can retain it on their own device or computer but we do not retain any ownership rights as a library. Yes, we are ok with one article being purchased multiple times, but stats show that this hasn’t happened much.

The bottom line is that PPV has allowed us to greatly expand access to more resources for a much more reasonable cost than we could possibly obtain through the subscription model alone. It allows us much more collection flexibility as well, so that we can (and have) switched between subscriptions and PPV as usage warrants, for non-essential (non-core) titles.

Lots of articles have been written about PPV by others in the professional literature, and I’ve given several presentations in various places about our experience, including at ALA and The Charleston Conference. A writeup of a presentation I co-presented at last year’s Charleston Conference will be available in the proceedings when they are published soon, for example. I’m hoping to have a more formal publication on this topic available soon, written in collaboration with two other colleagues.

Steve

Steve Oberg

Assistant Professor of Library Science

Electronic Resources and Serials

Wheaton College (IL)

+1 (630) 752-5852