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 licences, access through this route is nil. Levels of access for different sectors, and restrictions on use and re-use, are examined further below.

Pay-per-view

4.12. When licensed access is not available, payment for access to individual items, or pay-per-view (PPV), is an option; but it has not proved especially attractive in the online environment. A decade ago, the British Library’s provision through its document supply service constituted a major route for access to material not available in the library of your own university or other organisation. The service still operates; but the advent of online access and publishers’ big deals for university libraries has led to a steep decline in the numbers of articles and other material delivered through it, for both UK and overseas customers. Publishers’ own PPV services have not proved widely attractive; nor as yet have new services such as DeepDyve, which provides access on a time-limited rental basis for web browser viewing, rather than for downloading, shown signs as yet of generating large volumes of business.

4.13. A key problem for PPV and similar services is the cost to the user. The cost of PPV for a single article from many journals typically ranges from £15 to £20. Users are often reluctant to pay such fees, especially when they may be uncertain from the information given in an abstract whether the article is indeed relevant to their needs. Moreover, the transaction costs of paying for access to relevant content from many different journals and publishers present a significant barrier to many individuals and organisations. Both transaction and cash costs may be lower for researchers in universities and other non-commercial organisations who can use the British Library’s document supply service at ‘library privilege’ rates, but even then the cost of a single item where supply is guaranteed within 24 hours is £16. Rental via DeepDyve is much cheaper, at US$1-5, but the inability to download may be too restrictive for many users.

Repositories

4.14. A third route to access is through repositories. There are over two hundred repositories active in the UK: over 150 institutional repositories and the rest classified as either disciplinary, Governmental, or ‘aggregating’.

4.15. The largest institutional repository in the UK, according to the number of records contained, is the University College London (UCL) Discovery repository, with over 225,000 items, followed by the Cambridge D-Space repository with over 190,000 items. Other institutions in the top ten include Southampton, where the Eprints repository has over 82,000 items; Glasgow, with 52,000; Aberdeen with