[Caveat Emptor! The following notice is about the Trojan Horse that S/SL/PPV has offered in order to preserve the status quo. It has been discussed in many of the contributions to this forum as the "hybrid" solution. S.H.]
Marvin Margoshes <physc...@earthlink.net>: There is a news item on p. 14 of the Sept. 15, 1998 issue of the Library Journal on a test by Elsevier and 10 university libraries of a novel scheme for pricing online journals. Briefly, a library may subscribe to a set number of articles in any of Elsevier's online journals. Once an article is accessed by anyone at the university, anyone else at that location can acess it without additional charge. If more articles are accessed than the subscription provides for, the cost of each additional article is higher than the price per article in the subscription. Elsevier will compile and provide to the university a list of the articles accessed and who accessed them. The article was not on the LJ Web site today (9/14), and I have sent an e-mail to the journal asking if it will be posted or if I may copy it from the journal for this discussion group. I'll keep you posted. The concept brings to mind some unintended consequences of this kind of pricing. Would it cause scholarly journals to do more to create interest in certain articles? Would it lead to rating of articles by the number of times they are accessed, instead of the number of times they are cited? If the library knows who is accessing a journal, will there be a temptation to charge a fee to the user? The world of scholarship and the world of commerce collide again.