Experiences of Others

It is perhaps useful to note also some of the experiences of other publishers.

Red Sage Experiment

The Red Sage experiment started in 1992 and ran through 1996. It was initially started by Springer-Verlag, the University of California at San Francisco, and AT&T Bell Labs. Ultimately, several other publishers joined in, and more than 70 biomedical journals were delivered to the desktops of medical students and faculty at UCSF. As with TULIP, the experiment proved much harder to implement than had been originally hoped for. To the best of my knowledge, there were no user charges, so no data is available on the interplay of price and user acceptance. But what is notable is that there was greater critical mass of user-preferred titles among the Red Sage titles and, as a result, usage was very high. The horse will drink if brought to the right water.

Society CD-ROM Options

A second anecdote comes from discussions last year with a member of the staff of the American Institute of Physics. At least one of their affiliated member societies decided to offer members an option to receive their member subscriptions on CD-ROM rather than on paper, at the same price (i.e., the amount allocated from their member dues). The numbers I recall are that more than 1,500 members of the society took the option, finding the CD-ROM a more attractive alternative. I suspect that had they tried to sell the CD-ROM on top of the cost of the basic subscription, there would have been few takers. However, in this case, if you ignore the initial investment to develop the CD, the CD option saved the society money because it was cheaper on the incremental cost basis to make and ship the CDs rather than print and mail the paper version. In this case, the economics favored everyone.

BioMedNet

The final observation relates to an electronic service that started last year called BioMedNet. It is a "club" for life scientists, offering some full text journals, Medline, classified ads (the most frequently used service), marketplace features, news,

and other items. To date, membership is free. There are more than 55,000 members, and another 1,000 or more come in each week. The site is totally underwritten at the moment by its investors, with an expectation of charging for membership at some later date but with the plan that principal revenues will come from advertising and a share of marketplace transactions. The observation here is that while the membership is growing steadily, usage is not yet high per registered member. There is a core of heavy users, but it is rather small (2-3%). So, again, behavior and acceptance is not a function of price but of perceived value. Is it worth my time to visit the site?