A New Pricing Plan for Electronic Licensing of ACS Journals

Since STM journals went online 10 years ago, publishers have been struggling to find appropriate pricing strategies in a rapidly changing environment. It has been quite a challenge as customers and authors have questioned just about every aspect of the traditional model for journal publishing. There have been numerous approaches and experiments, and they continue.

We have learned from what other publishers have accomplished and have undertaken our own approaches and experiments, which have been profoundly successful in generating revenue growth and expanding worldwide access to our content.

For the past two years, we have grappled with the problem of decoupling online pricing entirely from print. That is, we cannot go on indefinitely telling customers that they should pay us an x% increase each year, year after year, based on what they spent with us on print in 1998!

An enormous amount of analysis has gone into this study. The Callidon Group, our pricing consultant, has been an invaluable partner in helping us to deconstruct our business. They have provided sophisticated approaches and creative ideas. Together, we have sorted through and evaluated a lot of options.

In November, the Governing Board for Publishing approved our new pricing plans for implementation in 2008. Under this new schema, online pricing will become totally unrelated to print subscription prices. Moreover, the new plan will give ACS Publications and its journal customers a rational and largely objective way to set prices for online access.

A tier-based approach utilizing objective criteria such as Carnegie classification, enrollment, and usage to determine pricing levels, the plan segments the institutional market by customer type (domestic academic, international academic, corporate, and government) and gross national income. This methodology will allow us to: (1) assign customers to pricing levels that make sense, (2) treat customers equitably within each group, (3) make pricing more transparent, (4) use mitigating strategies to help customers migrate affordably to the new the plan over a reasonable period of time, and (5) provide for future growth and ensure the journal program’s continuing economic vitality.

We are confident that this new plan will keep the program financially sound. We are also confident that most customers will react positively to the approach and rationale because we have tested it conceptually with so many of them.

This plan is a vitally important innovation for ACS Publications. We hope you will agree that it charts the right direction for the ACS to follow.

Dean Smith
Vice President, Sales & Marketing