Pricing and Bundling Electronic Information Goods: Field Evidence

Dramatic increases in the capabilities and decreases in the costs of computers and communication networks have fomented revolutionary thoughts in the scholarly publishing community. In one dimension, traditional pricing schemes and product packages are being modified or replaced. We designed and undertook a large-scale field experiment in pricing and bundling for electronic access to scholarly journals: PEAK. We provided Internet-based delivery of content from 1200 Elsevier Science journals to users at multiple campuses and commercial facilities. Our primary research objective was to generate rich empirical evidence on user behavior when faced with various bundling schemes and price structures. In this article we report initial results. We found that although there is a steep initial learning curve, decision-makers rapidly comprehended our innovative pricing schemes. We also found that our novel and flexible "generalized subscription" was successful at balancing paid usage with easy access to a larger body of content than was previously available to participating institutions. Finally, we found that both monetary and non-monetary user costs have a significant impact on the demand for electronic access.

Collection sales: good or bad for journals?

This note discusses the impact of collection sales (i.e., the bundling of several journals for sale by publishers to libraries) on journals. The advent of electronic journal distribution implies that bundling is an efficient sales strategy, and can act to extend the reach of a journal. Current arrangements are discussed and shown to lead to tensions between commercial publishers and non-profit journals. The note argues that non-profit journals should not abandon their participation in collection sales programmes. Rather, non-profit journals may benefit from withdrawing from commercial publishers which distribute their own for-profit journals, and from joining together to be distributed by less commercial publishers who set relatively low prices for their collections.Journal pricing; bundling; price discrimination

System Design, User Cost and Electronic Usage of Journals

Dramatic increases in the capabilities and decreases in the costs of computers and communication networks have fomented revolutionary thoughts in the scholarly publishing community. In one dimension, traditional pricing schemes and product packages are being modified or replaced. We designed and undertook a large-scale field experiment in pricing and bundling for electronic access to scholarly journals: PEAK. We provided Internet-based delivery of content from 1200 Elsevier Science journals to users at multiple campuses and commercial facilities. Our primary research objective was to generate rich empirical evidence on user behavior when faced with various bundling schemes and price structures. In this article we explain the different types and levels of cost that users faced when accessing individual articles, and report on the effect of these costs on usage. We found that both monetary and non-monetary user costs have a significant impact on the demand for electronic access. We also estimate how taking user costs into account would change the optimal (least cost) bundle of access options that an institution should purchase.

History of E-Journals and Electronic Databases in the URI Libraries

Examines the history of the acquisition of electronic journals and databases at the University of Rhode Island Library. Brief statement of policy, strategy, risk, costs, pricing, and peers

The Faustian Grip of Academic Publishing

The journal acquisition budget of libraries is not increasing at the same rate as subscription rates creating the serials' crisis. Many solutions have been proposed including the freely available electronic journal. However, all the solutions suffer the same Faustian Grip - namely that the actors in the academic publishing game have little or no incentive to stop publishing in the current journals. We examine those incentives concluding that even with a better more efficient technology, the actors will not change from the current academic publishing institution, and the serials' crisis will remain.serials crisis journal pricing academic publishing

Polarization in the future journal publishing ecosystem : Selective subscription journals and open access mega-journals

The development of information technology has drastically changed scholarly communication. The advent of electronic journals has changed the industrial structure of academic publishing. As the market concentration of journal publishing continues to increase, the pricing of journals has been dominated and controlled by large publishers. The never-ending rise of subscription prices is approaching a tipping point that libraries/institutions – even in high-income countries – can no longer bear. In these circumstances, the open access (OA) movement has been promoted over the past 15 years, and new types of publications have appeared. This paper discusses the position of each stakeholder in the OA landscape, and foresees a new ecosystem of future journal publishing – the polarization of selective subscription journals and OA mega-journals

Surprising Subscriptions: How Electronic Journal Publishing Has Affected the Partnership Among Subscription Agents, Publishers and Librarians

This compilation is a mixture of papers submitted by speakers and text derived from notes taken by the moderator and Mary Hawks of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Library and has been reviewed by the participants

Competition and cooperation: Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals

The conversion of scholarly journals to digital format is proceeding rapidly, especially for those from large commercial and learned society publishers. This conversion offers the best hope for survival for such publishers. The infamous "journal crisis" is more of a library cost crisis than a publisher pricing problem, with internal library costs much higher than the amount spent on purchasing books and journals. Therefore publishers may be able to retain or even increase their revenues and profits, while at the same time providing a superior service. To do this, they will have to take over many of the function of libraries, and they can do that only in the digital domain. This paper examines publishers' strategies, how they are likely to evolve, and how they will affect libraries

bundling electronic journals and competition among publishers

Site licensing of e-journals has been revolutionizing the way academic information is distributed. However, many librarians are concerned about the possibility that publishers might abuse site licensing by practicing bundling. In this paper, we analyze how bundling affects journal pricing in the context of STM electronic journal market and offer a novel insight on the bundling of a large number of information goods. We find that (i) when bundling is prohibited, surprisingly, market structure does not affect prices (ii) when bundling is allowed, each publisher finds bundling optimal and bundling increases the industry profit while reducing social welfare and (iii) any asymmetry-increasing merger is profitable but reduces social welfareBundling, Site Licensing, Interconnection, Merger

Bundling Electronic Journals and Competition among Publishers

Site licensing of electronic journals has been revolutionizing the way academic information is distributed. However, many librarians are concerned about the possi-bility that commercial publishers might abuse site licensing by practicing bundling. In this paper, we analyze how bundling affects journal pricing in the market of scientiÞc, technical and medical (STM) electronic journals and offer a novel insight on the bundling of a large number of information goods. We Þnd that (i) when bundling is prohibited, surprisingly, industry concentration does not affect prices (ii) when bundling is allowed, each publisher Þnds bundling proÞtable and bundling increases the industry proÞt while reducing social welfare and (iii) any merger among publishers already active in the market is proÞtable but reduces social welfare