Cambridge U. Press Would Like to Rent You an Article

November 30, 2011, 12:21 pm

Will researchers pay for short-term access to journal articles? Cambridge University Press is about to find out. The publisher has just announced a rental program for articles from the more than 280 peer-reviewed journals it publishes.

“For just £3.99, $5.99 or €4.49, users are now able to read single articles online for up to 24 hours, a saving of up to 86% compared with the cost of purchasing the article,” the press said in an announcement. “After registration and payment, the reader is e-mailed a link, through which they can access and read the article in PDF format as often as they wish during the subsequent 24 hours.”

Readers may not download, print, or copy and paste the articles. That’s similar to the conditions set by DeepDyve, which also offers 24-hour, no-download access to research articles, but on a monthly subscription basis.

Simon Ross, the managing director of Cambridge’s journals program, said in an e-mail that the model might appeal to students who need an article for only a brief time. But he said it’s mostly intended to help with the problem of so-called turnaway traffic. Researchers, especially those who aren’t associated with an institution, often see only the title and abstract of a paper they’re potentially interested in. High pay-per-view charges sometimes put them off buying the full version. Mr. Ross said that the rental program gives them an option to read the full article for less money and then decide if they want to buy the text on a pay-per-view basis.

He shared some of the press’s analysis of 2010 activity on its Cambridge Journals Online site. Out of 60 million views of journal abstracts, 20 percent came from institutionally unaffiliated users. And very few of those abstract views—0.01 percent, according to Mr. Ross—led to pay-per-view downloads.

“The model is also in tune with changing user behavior and attitudes,” Mr. Ross said in his e-mail. “We know that our users access more articles but spend less time per article. The rental vs. owning option is applicable in all sorts of businesses (Zipcar, for example).”

A highly informal poll on Twitter produced more initial skepticism than enthusiasm about the Cambridge article-rental plan. ”24 hours access, w/o ability to markup or download, or view again? Nope. No researcher I know would get much use from a 24-hour evaporative e-article,” one librarian responded. Another said, “Do they use the flashing device from ‘Men in Black’ to wipe any memory of the article after 24 hours as well?” One researcher said it seemed most likely to appeal to researchers without institutional affiliations. Let us know in the comments what you think.

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profdrsoandso

Wait, so CUP wants to make it possible to charge people for a look at an article so they can decide if they then want to pay another, higher price for it? And they think this is appealing to students? My goodness, that sounds misconceived.
gavin_moodie

I agree with the observation of the librarian quoted in the article: as it is presented Cambridge University Press’ offer is unattractive. But with a bit of tweaking it might be useful. If I could read an article for $6 and if I liked it download it for the balance of the purchase price that would be attractive for journals to which my university doesn’t subscribe.
blendedlibrarian

My son is a bench chemist at a research lab. They have no library resources and don’t subscribe to the major databases. Sometimes he just needs to get at an article to look up a formula or research method. His company would probably be more than happy to pay $6 to get immediate access when time is of the essence and they don’t care about having permanent access. Ross mentions that “turnaway market” and this just might appeal to that crowd. I sure hope our students don’t fall into this trap.
bfrank1

Well, they aren’t marketing this stuff to students – why would anyone do that? It’s easy – I pay the 6 bucks, take a few pictures of the screen with my smart-phone, and I’m in business.
12009444

For more mainstream research articles, I hope students would still have access to many research publications through inter-library loan. To me this price point for many publications seems steep. Students are becoming used to paying this much for complete ebooks (granted those would not be research texts).
cwinton

I find this a bit laughable. The pdf may have been configured so you can’t save, print, or copy/paste, but since you can display it on your computer you can capture any page you are interested in with a screen shot, and if you really want the blocked features that badly, scan the image to recover it in word processing format. I suspect any student would quickly resort to that tactic, especially given the rather high price for such limited access. Or perhaps knowing that even the marginally technically savvy know how to take such measures, perhaps that is why Cambridge has set the price point so high?
bfrank1

It would be a lot smarter to set the price low enough to sell more copies, but that would be more like a real business plan, for which publishers are not famous.
amcneece

Gee, that’s a real bargain….
joud3084

It’s mystifying why the main journal publishers think any more than the 0.01% who currently pay highway robbery charges would want either to pay the current $25 per article charges or a view-only $6 rental fee. Is there no alternative that would allow print publishers to replicate the iTunes model, such that members would download some sort of securable PDF files to a software/reader with no print option (but which would allow annotation and permanent access), and where users could pay maybe 50 cents per download to build a permanent online research library? One might consider calling it, I don’t know, a Kindle Scholar or Nook Researcher?

The idea that a 250-page CUP paperback book is only $18, but one is charged $6 just to look at a document one-tenth the length, or that $6 to CUP gets you 24-hours of research voyeurism when 99 cents gets you permanent access in iTunes to the one of the greatest or most popular musical works of all time reflects, I think, a business model in serious need of revision.
bobfutrelle

The desperation of big businesses shows up in foolish attempts such as this. They’re frightened. In the meantime, more and more papers go to open-access journals, and authors post a pre-pub copy for all to download. This feeble and hair-brained attempt by CUP will not slow the activities designed to work around the big businesses attempts to monopolize/privatize intellectual property – ideas and results. The impact factor of open-access journals continues to grow.
landrumkelly

SCREEN CAPTURE PLUS PHYSICAL PRINTING:

If one sees a portion (say, five separate pages scattered here and there) of the article that one likes and is likely to cite or use again, then six print screens later (one for getting the bibliographic information) one has something that one can save and print and have a hard copy for effectively forever. I have used a quote from an early (1955) John Rawls article (“Two Concepts of Rules”) in _Philosophical Review_ in several subsequent publications or papers presented at conferences.

Rarely is something so valuable that one really needs to read the entire thing again. Is capturing a page or so here and there ethical? Probably not. Will people do it? Some most assuredly will.

JSTOR (OR SOMETHING LIKE IT):

A more interesting question for me is how many Cambridge University Press articles are on JSTOR. From JSTOR I can legally print a copy. Look for more services like JSTOR that work with CUP and that do not cost an arm and a leg for individual membership, and all of these quandaries will tend to evaporate.

A lot of us already have institutional membership in JSTOR or something like it, and so such ethical quandaries do not arise. We do not need additional subscription services for many journals. For the rest look for new and innovative vending schemes.
http://twitter.com/matthies67 Brad Matthies

I wonder if libraries should start charging Cambridge University Press a fee? We could call it the Library Business License. For a reasonable price, say $1 per FTE, Cambridge could purchase the license which would allow the library to consider purchasing their journals. :-)
mbelvadi

Think about what you’ll have to go through to actually pay that $6 – credit card and all. And then think about your library’s interlibrary loan service which will get you the article for free. Still worth the bother?
mbelvadi

Yes. Most people, including some content providers, don’t seem to understand how the web and web browsers work at all. By definition, if you display content (text, video, even audio) in your web browser, you have in fact “downloaded” the content to your own computer. The software may not offer you a nice little “save” button, but a copy of the bytes did in fact arrive into your local computer and it’s usually not that hard to find one way or another to capture/save them, especially if you’re well educated enough to be reading scholarly journal articles in the first place.
mbelvadi

CUP’s problem in setting a reasonable price is the price discrimination they already participate in with academic libraries. If they price the article too low, they’ll find that libraries will cancel their expensive subscriptions and just provide their users with library-paid pay-per-article accounts to download the articles they want at the time. So they have to look at their IP-based subscription usage data, determine what libraries really pay on a cost-per-article basis, and make sure the individual articles cost more than that. At least, if they have any business savvy, they went through that analysis.
mbelvadi

I wonder how many of that 20% of unaffiliated viewers are actually researchers (including students) with an institutional affiliation that would get them the content for free, but they were Googling from off campus and went to Cambridge’s site without running through their library’s proxy server first. Cambridge would have no way of knowing that those visitors, coming from their home ISP’s IP range, have an institutional affiliation and will, if confronted with a $6 charge, simply stop and go back to their library’s ILL form or journal lookup system to get free access.

I find it highly improbable that 20% of the views of these densely scholarly journals could be coming from people without a scholarly institutional connection in their lives, even if CUP’s IP detector says that they didn’t have one at the moment of those particular clicks. If this could actually be true, I think it would say something very negative about the quality of CUP’s journals to the scholarly community – think about that for a minute. (But CUP’s journals are very high quality which is why I don’t think it is true.)

Librarians and faculty need to do a better job whenever they can of helping students (and other faculty) understand about IP based authentication, and offering tools like LibX and the Google Scholar library affiliation preference setting to make sure they their patrons know how to retrieve library-licensed content for free even when they are off-campus.
MarjoryMunson

There is one benefit to this type of corporate action – it definitely encourages people to create or better acquaint themselves with new technologies that will allow them to get around costs and restrictions that they see as unfair.
austinbarry

$6 to view an article for 24 hours seems high, but it’s a deal compared to $25 to “purchase” an article which seems excessive (when one can purchase a full-length book for about the same price).
andy14

Journal articles are like newpaper articles. You read them once, and then move on. If the article is so earth shattering that I want to keep a copy, I can just screen capture it. Sure, it won’t be a searchable pdf, but if information is what you are looking for, who cares whether it is a bitmap or a pdf.
ed_eckel

I agree that publishers seem to lack the imagination to come up with a more workable, popular way to make these articles available for much cheaper. I’m sure that if articles were available for much cheaper, many more would be purchased legally. I love the idea of a Kindle Scholar or Nook Researcher. Sounds like a great business idea.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_GGYJHDUNVKTEZHQGY7VKCTZ2RM Me

I had no idea CUP was an agent of big business. Anyway they’re not the ones sounding desperate.
mbelvadi

Read once then move on, really? What field are you in? I’ve worked with numerous faculty to help them organize all of the PDFs of scholarly journal articles (not their own) that they’ve collected in their research, so that they can find them easily later when writing their own research up. If their interest is so casual that they don’t care about saving it, it’s probably casual enough not to be worth the $6. Casual = not important to their own research/writing.
Frank Lowney

This only raises the question of whether the benefit to journal article authors is commensurate to the cost of access to it. Are the values of scholarship being undermined by this emphasis on revenues?
renellin

If an article is to be used and sourced, how then would the grading professor access it? Would he/she also have to pay? How about anyone else trying to check the facts?
commentarius

Lordy, sir, where have you been for the last thirty years? This question was naive in 1985, and it’s laughable now.
commentarius

This model would only work for the smallest libraries. The accounting hassles and staff costs of pay-per-view far outweigh any added costs from actual subscriptions.
brhutch

I’m not sure I’d characterize any university press as “big business.” And the expression is “hare-brained,” not “hair-brained.” But your points are good ones, and I can’t help but wonder why scholars/academic presses think the copyright to an academic article is worth ANYTHING. I own the copyright to several of the articles I’ve published over the years, and if I had to put a value on these, that value would be ZERO. I suggest that the value of the right to view a scholarly article for 24 hours is also ZERO, and I think it likely that the market will correct for this–and pretty quickly, too. The points about ILL are on target: if one can get something for free, the only reason to pay for it is for some sort of convenience factor, like the right to have access immediately instead of next week. Let’s wait 6 months and see how much CUP is charging for this nearly-worthless service then.

Of course, if I am correct that the copyright to an academic article is essentially valueless, this simply accords well with reality. We don’t get paid for writing scholarly articles–at least nobody I know does. Scholarship is its own reward (and I say this in all seriousness). I certainly didn’t get my Ph.D. with the idea that it would help me make lots of money, and I suspect that at least for those of us with doctorates in the humanities, making money was not a major factor in our decisions to go to grad school.

Assuming that CUP owns the copyrights to its journal articles, those are clearly NOT valueless to CUP due to sales to libraries, but I suspect that if CUP had to rely on subscriptions to individuals, most of its journals would go out of print pretty quickly. I’ve written one scholarly book, published by a press (Boydell & Brewer) also located in Cambridge that is considered a rival of CUP in the area of medieval studies. I own that copyright. My book was also marketed primarily to libraries. The value of the copyright, it could be argued, is the sum of the royalties I’ve received from Boydell & Brewer–probably around $250 total, if I had to guess. My most recent check was for $5.20 (before that, they were all in pounds sterling). Of course, that’s a value-in-hindsight; there was no way to know when the thing was published how much revenue it would generate. The print run was 500 copies and they’ve sold all those, but I did get a letter a while back telling me that they were considering doing another run. Still, in my view it’s unlikely that the book will generate significant royalties from here on out, so the value of the copyright to a scholarly book is fairly minimal too, as it turns out. I guess my point is that since we weren’t in this for the money to begin with, it shouldn’t surprise us if people aren’t willing to pay very much–or anything at all–for our work-product.Now, in addition to my Ph.D., I also have a J.D., and money WAS a factor in my decision to go to law school. But it certainly wasn’t the top factor, or even a major factor. I could have gone to business school, after all. That’s what my friends who wanted to make lots of money did, and they definitely make lots of money.B. R. Hutcheson
http://twitter.com/ProfNS Prof. Neal Steiger

Make it 99 cents and we’ll talk.
gavin_moodie

I agree that many vendors still have clumsy processes for small payments, but I presume they will eventually catch up with Amazon, Paypal and others which have payments in a single click.

I have been blessed by academic libraries providing excellent services, but rarely do I put them to the trouble of providing an article which is readily accessible. While their service is free to me I assume it is much more expensive overall than the price the commercial publishers charge.
tdmoritz

This is simply further evidence the academic publishing industry failing
their own mission — the viability of open access publishing models is now clearly demonstrated — Public Library of Science? [http://www.plos.org/about/what-is-plos/beyond-publishing/ ] BioMedCentral? [SEE: http://www.biomedcentral.com/about PennSoft? [SEE: http://www.pensoft.net/about.php ] — refusal to transition to those models simply represents self-aggrandizing inertia — to the detriment of the global community…
Dr_Zachary_Smith

Information wants to be free.

This smacks of music-industry desperation. The times, they are a’changin’, and many in our little corner of the world don’t seem to grasp that fact.
nomentanus

No task is more important to an educational institution than that of interfering with the distribution of knowledge discovered on the taxpayers’ dime. Thanks to CUP and so many more universities for putting so much time and effort into this important accomplishment!

Oh no, wait…