Informed Strategies

As users access more content on the Web, they expect the convenience of having journal literature on their desktop at the click of a mouse. Increased access to full-text electronic journals results in increased demand by the user to be able to read articles online or download them - with or without a subscription. In light of this, various speakers, including this author, have begun to refer to the "deconstruction" of the journal. This raises the question of whether the article rather than the journal will become the primary unit of sale.

Fifteen years ago when bibliographic databases became available on CD-ROM to end users, demand for a wide range of articles not held locally resulted in dramatic increases in interlibrary loan and document delivery through such services as Uncover. However, high retrieval and handling costs precluded economies of scale in traditional document delivery service and that market is now flat.

In contrast, the electronic delivery of articles (in HTML on the screen or in PDF for printing), offers operational efficiencies by eliminating handling costs. The transactional sale can be implemented with an e-commerce engine that uses micropayments (such as Qpass does), accepts regular credit cards, or debits an account that is invoiced to the institution. This opens the door for publishers and aggregators to implement systems that allow viewing of articles on demand without a subscription.

These same efficiencies can be applied to interlibrary loan and there is an experiment in the UK, funded by JIST (Joint Information Systems Committee), called EASY, in which ingenta, in conjunction with the University of Lancaster, is fulfilling demand for interlibrary loans by delivering articles from the electronic version of the journal. Participating publishers are paid a flat royalty rate amounting to approximately $5 per article. Although this kind of transaction nets less than what publishers might earn from a document delivery service, it represents new revenue that they normally would not receive at all--an interesting experiment in light of the fact that some publishers have been reluctant to modify their licensing agreements to permit the library to use electronic transmission of articles for interlibrary loan.

Online document delivery satisfies the user's need for immediate access. Publishers are beginning to announce that their articles are available online for a fee without requiring a subscription.

For example, The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has offered fee based articles online for a year. Tim Ingoldsby, Director of Business Development, noted that the volume of articles increased noticably when AIP reduced the number of steps needed to buy an article online - simplifying the process for the user. (For more information , see http://ojps.aip.org/documentstore/index.html)

Academic Press now offers article sales via credit card and uses VeriSign for security purposes. Users must register with a password to access IDEAL and agree to terms that allow printing, copying and storing for personal use. Anyone can go to www.idealibrary.com and click on My Profile to search the database, view abstracts, and purchase articles.

EBSCO Online recently announced that it now offers institutional users pay-per-view access to more than 1,403 e-journals from a variety of publishers, including Kluwer and Blackwell. Once purchased on a credit card, the article is available online for seven days and can be downloaded, saved to disk or printed as needed. www.ebsco.com. However, this service is not available to individuals.

Many aggregators who offer full-text conversion and hosting services to journal publishers also provide pay-per-view capability. HighWire offers access to one article or the entire site for periods ranging from 24 hours to 30 days. www.highwire.org/lists/ppvsp.dtl. Catchword allows users to charge to a credit card to download an article. www.catchword.com.

While the print world is dominated by subscribers who want access to the whole journal, the electronic world opens the door for the occasional user to discover what they need article by article from a variety of journals and through a variety of means such as searching a journal database or an online bibliographic index, linking from a citation, or receiving an alerting service via e-mail with a table-of contents or references on a specific topic.

Index journals. Last year, the AIP and the American Physical Society (APS) co-published two new free virtual journals: Nanoscale Science and Technology and Biological Physics Research. www.virtualjournals.org. These two titles act as an "index" by offering abstracts that link directly to the articles which are available online in source journals published by AIP, APS and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, which publishes Science). Readers can view the articles online if they are paid subscribers to the source journals or are ready to pay to view the articles.

Linking. The CrossRef initiative www.crossref.org has created a vehicle that allows participating publishers to link directly from the citations in the back of their own articles to the full text of the cited article residing on another publishers' platform. Publishers are recognizing that these links increase the demand for articles and are exploring other ways to identify content to newly defined market segments and to occasional users.

Custom features. In addition to presenting new ways for users to identify relevant articles online, publishers are adding system capabilities that deliver custom options such as e-mail alerting services and the option of storing selected articles in an online filing cabinet for easy retrieval.

Services for libraries. The Institute of Physics (IOP) offers Stacks, a table of contents service, to load into online library catalogs to increase the visibility of articles for users browsing their local ILS systems. http://stacks.iop.org Both Academic Press and Elsevier offer training programs for librarians and users along with extended staff support to provide additional assistance as needed. Last year Academic Press used promotional items such as an espresso mug and pens to keep their journal database, Ideal, in front of the user.

While publishers are working to provide more ways to connect users with their content, librarians are working through consortial arrangements to provide access to databases of full-text journals from which patrons can select the articles they need. Surprising statistics from OhioLINK are raising questions about better ways to meet the information needs of users.

Tom Sanville, Executive Director of OhioLINK, in his talk at the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) 2000 Annual Conference, shared charts showing that more than half (51 percent) of the articles downloaded by users at participating institutions were from journals to which the libraries on those campuses did not subscribe. During the period surveyed, each university used on average three and a half times more titles than they had previously subscribed to in print.

Likewise David Kohl, who is an OhioLINK member and the Director of Libraries at the University of Cincinnati, challenged librarians at the Oxford 2000 Collection Development Retreat to create new models that shift the focus from subscribing to journals toward acquiring rights to journal collections. Users can then select the articles they need from a broader range of available journal titles.

Given the serials crisis of the last decade, it makes sense that many libraries are unable to afford the level of access desired by their users. Consortia licenses for databases of electronic journals deliver broader access than was previously available with print subscriptions, especially for smaller institutions.

Does this mean that we're entering an era of user-driven collection development? What is the optimum balance between owning a core collection and acquiring what users really need beyond the core? These questions remain to be answered and will be influenced by budgets, space limitations and innovative offerings.

The evidence from OhioLINK's recent data and AIP's experience with the articles requested from its Web site, demonstrates that a tremendous unmet demand for articles outside of the journal-subscription model. Both publishers and librarians are reluctant to replace the familiar stable journal-subscription model with a variable, on demand, pay-per-view model for article access. However, there are signs of transition as publishers reshape their offerings and consider new business models.

According to James Langer, President of the American Physical Society, there has been a long term trend of decreasing library subscriptions that averages 3 percent per year since 1970 http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-8/p35.html. This appears to be indicative of industry trends that reflect the libraries' efforts to eliminate duplicates and rely on the electronic archive. Since scholarly publishing has been financed primarily by institutional subscriptions, publishers are concerned that pay-per-view access to journal articles may accelerate the loss of library subscriptions, and that the new revenue from article sales could be less than the lost subscription revenue.

New library pricing models offer institutions a combination package subscription plus articles. Options may include allowing a library with a minimum level of subscriptions to acquire articles from a publisher's database on a fee-per-article basis or the option that, for an agreed amount based on prior subscriptions plus an increase, the library will have access to specified number of articles during the year. The various options are limited only by the creativity and economic perceptions of the buyer and seller.

There is little data on pricing for online articles in the scholarly community. The precedent for single article pricing is based on document delivery which averages $10 per article without substantial copyright fees. Publishers and aggregators who are beginning to experiment with article sales hold a wide range of opinions from those who believe that the cost per article could be as low as single digits to those who agree it should be in the $20-$30 range.

David Brown, the Director of Business Development at ingenta, noted that nearly all of the forty or so small and medium publishers they work with allow some form of pay-per-view access. He observed that there is price sensitivity above $30 per article and a cap of $40 to $45 per article. The ingenta institute has collaborated with the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) to produce several studies on subscription versus document delivery and end user needs related to electronic document delivery. www.ingenta.com/home/fs_ingentainstitute.htm.

More pressure on pricing exists in the ad-driven commercial realm. Northern Lights has made articles available to businesses and consumers for less than $5 per article. ProQuest is offering publishers a new service called Archiver, which enables publishers to generate revenue from their back files by selling articles online to the occasional user. Articles sell at the micropayment level of $1.50 to $4 through ProQuest's partnership with Qpass. www.pqarchiver.com/index.html.

Lexis-Nexis by Credit Card provides free searching to small businesses and charges only for the documents viewed: $3 for news, $9 for a legal document, $4 to $15 for company and financial information. Users can also subscribe to news and company materials for a day, several days or a week.

The Web is shifting the dynamics from a supply-driven, subscription-based, just-in-case collection to demand-driven, article-level, just-in-time access. In this environment the user selects what he or she wants as needed from a large file of content. The customer is king.

Within that context questions remain about the nature of the content users are willing to pay for. When money is at stake, users will pay for information that helps them make a better buying decision. Is having a well established brand such as Consumer Reports or the Wall Street Journal the key to success? Or does the archive need to be packaged as part of a subscription sale to simplify billing for the publisher and the customer?

In the academic environment, most researchers are accustomed to their institutions providing them with the content they need related to their work. To what extent are faculty or students willing to pay for additional convenience or customization?

Libraries have long held the role of preserving content for future generations which meant replicating content within society at different institutions. There is some security in this redundancy. However, it is far more efficient to have one electronic file that serves users everywhere, and this shifts the role of archiving back to the publisher who is assuming responsibility for converting the data so they can generate revenue from the sale of their older content.

What does this mean for the future of research? Recent evidence from JSTOR, presented by Kevin Guthrie at the PEAK Conference in March 2000, indicates that the average age of the top ten articles in half of the social science disciplines is greater than ten years. This confirms the value of an electronically accessible archive and serves as a caution against shifting to a model for research libraries where the criteria for value focus on productivity at the expense of future research.

Bell and Howell Information and Learning introduced ProQuest Archiver, which allows them to capitalize on their investment in digitizing the journals in their vault. Bell & Howell had existing agreements with publishers to make their content available electronically through ProQuest.

Now they are offering the publishers the ability to link transparently to an archive of their own content with an e-commerce front engine for the sale of individual articles. The publisher needs to set the price--as low as $1.50, which is the cost of a transaction. There is no cost to the publisher to create access to this online archive, and the publisher receives a portion of the sale.

The ProQuest search engine provides basic and advanced search capabilities and increased access often results in generating demand for a print copy. The publisher receives a list of those who have bought their content, and that serves as a lead-generation system identifying the occasional user. The service includes usage data, security, technical support, and 24/7 customer service.

One hundred publishers have signed up, and Bell and Howell expects to have 300-400 by the end of 2001 (as many as 500-1000 by the end of 2002). Among those publishers using Archiver are the publishers of the Academy of Management Journal, Business Week, USA Today, World Affairs, National Review, Vital Speeches of the Day, and Hildref publications: a mix of newspapers, magazines and academic journals.

This model offers the option to "outsource archiving" to publishers who are looking for cost effective ways to distribute their content to the broader market without incurring additional costs or without maintaining their own systems.

The very user who throws out a newspaper at the end of the day may be willing to pay a nominal amount for the convenience of accessing that same article online six months later. Qpass supports publishers in capturing the aftermarket for their publications and exploring new market segments. www.qpass.com.

Once a customer is registered with Qpass on a credit card, they can easily buy from any Qpass enabled site using their password. This is consolidated transactional billing at the article level and is similar to the service that subscription agents provide at the journal level.

Currents users of their service include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal (Interactive Edition), Forbes, Morningstar.com and the Los Angeles Times. The Qpass Digital Commerce Service includes registration, authentication, billing, merchandising, promotions and ongoing customer care.