[WikiEN-l] JSTOR "Early Journal Content" access

[Andrew Gray]

On 13 September 2011 11:27, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> But really, this is extortionate, and it's in no-one else's interests,
>> because the chances of someone paying $34 for an old article on such
>> an obscure issue are slim to vanishing, so the only consequence of the
>> high price is that no one gets to see it.
>
> I was under the impression that universities and such organisation
> have institutional subscriptions where their members can access the
> articles, but not at a per-article rate but some other negotiated
> rate, or flat rate. I'm sure there are details on the JSTOR website.
> So people probably are reading the article in question, but not at the
> per-article rate.

Institutional access is at a flat rate, or rather a bundled flat rate.
($3000 for all content in these collections, another $2000 for those
ones, etc). In this particular example, the article is in the "Arts &
Sciences III" collection of ~150 journals, which would cost a US
public university from $1,300 to $10,000 per year, depending on size,
as an ongoing expense. This is not to say that institutions don't
sometimes pay for individual articles - I know of some which do,
basically treating JSTOR as an expensive but fast on-demand ILL
service - but that most access is via their subscribed collections.

Discounting these users, Sarah's suggestion that it's never likely to
get used is pretty likely. JSTOR don't make very clear numbers on
"pay-per-view" articles available, but their published accounts do
confirm that they don't make very much money from it. We have specific
usage figures for one year only, which suggest that less than *0.005%*
of available articles got purchased in that period - and that those
were mostly at the cheapest end of the spectrum (averaging ~$6).

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