Reader Input: How Much Per Month for Scholarly Database Access?

This is a big issue for me right now. I need access to Web of Science (particularly for its ability to see who cites a paper) but the cost can’t really be justified for our small science faculty.We have it back to 1994 but I need it to go back much further.

I’d gladly use some of my research funds to pay for individual access. I’m thinking that $500/year would be reasonable, but truly I don’t have a good sense of what these resources cost in the first place.

I agree wrt taxes, Nels, but I’m thinking here about out-of-pocket expenses.

I exactly share your thoughts about NYTimes online – I couldn’t believe they were going to charge as much as they did; I signed up this year only because they gave me a “special half-price” blah blah blah rate for one year, but I wrote to customer service and told them that if they expected me to pay the full price rate 12 months from now, they were kidding themselves. The $10/month or around $100/year are definitely very real psychological thresholds for me.
There are a lot of scholarly databases I would pay $10/month for to gain access, as well as many academic ebooks I would buy access to IF the academic publishers offered something like that. But look at Chadwych-Healey, just to take an example in my field (Latin): they don’t do anything to interact with individual scholars; you know you’re in trouble when they don’t even quote individual subscription prices on their webpage so you can sign up and be done with it – they want you to contact a salesperson. Ugh. You know that means $$$.I would love to see some movement here: I don’t expect everything to be free (although THANK GOD FOR GOOGLE BOOKS), but something has got to give on the price structure – and that applies to academic books, too, not just databases.

Most university and college libraries already offer free on-line access to the daily NYtimes.  Mine has it thru’ the News Pages in Factiva and in Lexis-Nexis.  You will find it in the equivalent of the A to Z list of electronic resources on your libraries web page.  

That’s probably true, but with this post I’m more interested in the ways individuals access information when they don’t have institutional affiliation.

I guess I’d pay up to $50 for JSTOR access. I couldn’t afford much more, and I’d have to look carefully at usage to see if it would be worth renewing at the end of the year. 

Perhaps it’s worth the $500 figure that Heather threw out, but for those of us who are not university-affiliated, or those who are adjuncts and do not have research money, that figure it just impossible. 

As a librarian I would have to point out that those resources are not free.  Someone somewhere has to pay and for the library to do this they have to find the money which is getting increasingly difficult.

I often encounter this need, as an adjunct, when I often do not have access to databases in-between semesters or when teaching at one institution rather than another means access to different journals and databases varies.  In all honesty, I find the prices already set by many academic publishers for simply renting an article for twenty-four hours or purchasing rather ridiculously high ($35-45?!)

In my mind, a reasonable amount would be $10-15 a month.  Not only, as you said George, is this comparable with other online services, but I would imagine it would possibly open up access to a broader audience.  Why simply limit access to “scholars” or those doing research?  Why not have search results on topics show up in general Google results rather than Google Scholar?  If a lay reader is interested in, say, Charlie Chaplin, their interest may be equally piqued between a Wikipedia entry or blog dedicated to silent film as with a scholarly article on Chaplin’s work.  Having a reasonable access rate would also mean such curiosity or independent researchers will pay for access, rather than turn away and bemoan costs of good research and writing. I would be curious to know if the NY Times (since this example was brought up) generates potential purchasers of subscriptions (as confusing as they may be) by having articles crawled by Google and other search engines.

Individual access would be very clever, but it should be closer to $120/year, not the $500/year, and this is why. These are digital resources. If you make the price point attractive, many people will take up your service, but there is not anything close to a linear scaling in costs of providing the reliable service for increased users. Print, you could get discounts for volume printing, but you still saw substantial increases in cost as your user base increased. Digital, once you have the content and the system, you may need to scale the system up per 10,000 users, and admin on the same basis, but the publisher should be able to easily keep very healthy margins as user scales by orders of magnitude. The costs that they are charging can only come down to a couple of motivations. 1) They are subsidising their dying print industry because they refuse to see the cold light of dawn and drop dead trees for journals, etc. 2) They are just greedy #(*&$#()*&@. Could be both. These prices are just ridiculous. Some more at http://bit.ly/ik45QM http://shawnmehan.com/

It would make more sense if you asked what percentage of their income
people would be willing to pay, though even such a formula
wouldn’t be right: 3% of income is perfectly sustainable for someone affluent, but can be an unaffordable strain on someone living on a shoe string. So you should make a kind of cartesian graph with income range on one axis and percentage on the other, where people could anonymously click on a point corresponding to their income range and the percentage they are willing to pay. See also Lawrence Lessig’s “The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge” talk at CERN http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/jD5TB2eebD5d/ , from 7:52.

There’s a huge difference between a scholarly database and actually getting the articles indexed within it.  JSTOR is a journal package so the full text is there, but in databases like Web of Science, your subscription only gets you the citations and abstracts.  It’s your library’s companion subscriptions to journal packages that allows you to get some full text.  Would people pay anything just for the database if it did not have full text? Probably not many.

Okay, but the question asked in this post is “If–for whatever reason–you were offered the chance to pay a monthly fee for individual access to a scholarly database, how much would you be willing to pay?” If you’d like to give two different amounts–one for a database that only gives you citations and abstracts and one for a full-text database–that would be fine.

Thank you!  It’s time we start asking these kinds of questions.  It’s not simple.  What I as an individual would pay, from nothing to hundreds of dollars/year, depends on the database and what I can do with its contents.  As a librarian for a research institution,  the process is similar but is a balance of institutional priorities and available funds.  I am not in favor of the demise of either publishing or copyright, but for all the right reasons – open access, digital technology, NIH Public Access policy, on and on – we have reached a stalemate: fairness and equity have left the room.  Technology marches on, but there is no longer a rational or predictable relationship between content (quality or quantity) and cost.  Personal and institutional choice has given way to   calculation/negotiation/compromise.  It’s time for an open discussion of information in all its variety by those who create, package, preserve, use and enjoy it. 

$10/month – in a heartbeat :)

I am delighted that so many  colleagues would spend $10 “in a heartbeat” for one full-text database. But for many younger and adjunct faculty members, and those at small colleges or community colleges, that may be difficult, while already struggling to feed a family–without cable, a car, a home computer, new clothing, vacations, or Starbucks coffee. And how many “only $10 a month” can anyone afford? If our institutional libraries cannot support faculty (& thus student) needs, we need to re-think our overall budgeting. Similarly, vendors who sell subscriptions, films, and books to libraries might prorate prices, based on numbers of students or faculty–not because it costs less or more to produce the resource, but because larger institutions will use them more and can better afford them. Why should a small 4-year college with an operating budget of $25 million using a film once a year for a class of 10-15 students pay the same $295 as a huge research university with a $2 billion operating budget that may use it in 10 classes per term, 40-300 students in each class?
So, what would I pay for occasional use of one full-text database? The same as a paper subscription–i.e., $3-4 a month.