Seriously? A Series of Tips on Setting Up a Research Library (Part 7)

“[The Freedom of Information Act is] the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored.” -- Antonin Scalia (American Supreme court justice , b.1936)

THE PRICE IS RIGHT(?)  … Consider Pay-per-View
Access to high quality information is expensive. For example, according to Cost-Benefit Analysis of Electronic Information Resources: An Evaluation of the Middle East Technical University Library, in 2006 the Middle East Technical University spent over $500,000 on a subscription to ScienceDirect. (Source: http://eprints.rclis.org/7889/2/HACER_BATI_PRESENTATION.pdf)

In 2012 Study of Subscription Prices for Scholarly Society Journals, Kodi Tillery, Marketing Manager, Allen Press, writes “We live in a time where library patrons want immediate access to even more journal content, and libraries are searching for ways to meet these demands with even tighter budgets. Thus, pay-per-view (PPV) or transactional access may be the way of the future for some as an alternative to Big Deals.”
(Source: http://allenpress.com/system/files/pdfs/library/2012_AP_JPS.pdf)

For example, Trinity University’s Coates Library “embarked on a new program to provide greater access to all articles in the journals made available through Elsevier, a major publisher of periodicals in the sciences, psychology, and business/economics. Rather than increasing our subscription base, we cancelled all Elsevier print journals and instead offered “pay-per-view” from its ScienceDirect platform. With this kind of service the library pays a $30 charge for any Elsevier article and it is immediately available electronically.” (Source: Journal Article Access Via a Pay-Per-View Model: Report and recommendations from an academic leave, Spring Semester 2010, http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=lib_faculty)

ScienceDirect is a full text database.  That is, when you identify an article you want to read, you can access the full text of that article immediately, assuming your organization either (a) subscribes or (b) has a pay-per-view option in place.

Equally important to serious researchers are the bibliographic databases.  These typically offer only the bibliographic information plus an abstract.  In other words, you will have to obtain the full text of any given article elsewhere.  More about obtaining such articles in a future post.

The engineering database EI Compendex, available through ProQuest Dialog, is an excellent example of a bibliographic database.  In the past, searchers of the Dialog databases had to have a Dialog subscription.  Recently, however, ProQuest has initiated a pay-per-view option.

In Science/engineering bibliographic databases’ future: collection development issues at the university of Maryland, Nevenka Zdravkovska and Bob Kackley recommend that for bibliographic databases, you might consider using only those vendors that offer PPV – Pay-per-view. (Source: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1905&context=iatul)

TIP: Keep PPV in mind when talking to vendors about access options to their information products.

Visit www.jeansteinhardtconsulting.com for more useful tricks and tips.