Chemistry Central Blog
ACS Announces New Journal Pricing Model
For some time now, Dean Smith and his colleagues at the American Chemical Society have been working on a new pricing structure for a transition to electronic delivery of ACS journal content, some may say heralding a move to e-only, though Bob Bovenschulte has previously declared that he believes print will be around for some time yet.
Customers have been cancelling print in recent years, either in full or part. Others are new customers who simply don't want print, and are concerned at paying prices driven by the current print-based model.
What they've come up with is a pricing scheme based on several factors including Carnegie Classifications, usage and enrollment. Customers can add or cancel print.
The new pricing the ACS will, by 2008, divide customers into 4 categories
- domestic academic
- international academic
- corporate
- government
... pretty easy to do. The next part is to use the classifications to determine which of the pricing tiers the institution should fit into, per journal. With its efforts to add "fairness" to the way of pricing its content, the ACS has added a level of complexity that many will find baffling. More importantly, it is extremely difficult to budget for - usage within an institute varies year to year, depending on the focus of the research and some may see subscription charges rise sharply due to a surge in activity in a given area.
I would like to say that all you need to know about this new model is available here, but that simply isn't true. For a start, the site includes nothing about the actual dollar values of each tier, or, how these prices might be affected by the uptake of the ACS's Author Choice open access model. If universities are to be assessed by such fairness criteria, I wonder if the ACS will then allow them to make this public, in turn allowing universities to compare themselves with each other, and the prices they pay.
The move to a usage based economy is certainly interesting, given that after creation of the first copy of an article the cost to distribute additional copies via the Internet is marginal! The value we add as publishers is at the author side, and publishing should be seen as part of the research process. If we accept this, and make all of the content we manage on the behalf of authors, available at no cost to interested readers the community can build whatever services it needs on top of this, through datamining and mashups for example.
For more on ACS pricing see: ACS Value Based Pricing
Posted by Bryan Vickery at 17:10 Comments (0)
