[WikiEN-l] Subscription idea

[Andrew Gray]

2008/12/20 Alec Conroy <alecmconroy at gmail.com>:

> I suspect, like insurance, the database people wouldn't play ball if
> we allowed an opt-in strategy, but what about buying institutional
> access for the community of admins + non-admins with rollback or some
> other bit.   Or, the community of people who have a FA or something.

Yeah. Individual opt-in isn't a good idea for the database providers;
they sell access for a reasonable sum per capita as a block grant, but
(somewhat opportunistically) will offer an individual subscription
rate at ten or a hundred times that.

For example, a university can subscribe to the online Oxford English
Dictionary for ~$0.25 per full-time student (with a minimum cost of
~$500/year); a single individual subscriber would be charged $300 for
the same level of access. Numbers vary immensely and are not usually
very easy to find publicly, so this may not reflect what people are
actually paying - but it's in the right ballpark.

That's three orders of magnitude, there! Anything that let us opt in
individuals for a nominal fee would pretty much be able to kill their
individual sales service stone dead...

It's certainly something that has promise, but it'd call for a clear
definition of quite what we're trying to achieve and a lot of very
careful negotiation with the suppliers by someone at WMF. The major
advantage, I suppose, is that having some kind of an access deal with
us is something they get to write nice press releases about :-)

A productive first step would be to have someone at WMF (any idea who
to suggest this to?) make inquiries with JSTOR and sound them out on
the issue; they are pretty good at working with users with weird
requirements, are themselves a fluffy hippy nonprofit body, and are
probably the people most likely to try to work with us.

(They also have one of the most useful resources we could look for, so win-win!)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk