How Usage Based Pricing Can Level the Playing Field

Abstract

Traditionally, serial purchases (including databases) have been driven by faculty and are ultimately a request driven model. Usage based pricing, with an emphasis on institution wide use, takes some of this decision making away from faculty and puts it into the hands of the entire university community. Suddenly what faculty say is important, or what they say the Library should be spending its money on, is countered with publishers or vendors who trot out use statistics to show that no, what the Library should be spending its money on is what is being used. Usage based pricing would take into account the entire university community’s use, and not just faculty preferences. Consequently, such a change in pricing and collection development has the possibility to lead to some conflict between student needs and use and faculty needs and use.