Physical Review A Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators & Beams Physical Review B Physical Review Online Archive (PROLA) Physical Review C Reviews of Modern Physics Physical Review D Physical Review Focus Physical Review E Physical Review Letters Bulletin of the American Physical Society Physical Review Index
All subscriptions include institutitional online access via IP registration as set forth in the terms and conditions of the APS Institutional Online Agreement (Single Site License).
All subscribers will be offered the option of an Online Only subscription at 15% below the price for print plus online (print only is not available).
Prices for US academic institutions will be based on the Carnegie Foundation classifications. (www.carnegiefoundation.org).
Non-US academic institutions will be placed in the Carnegie Research Extensive (tier 3), Carnegie Research Intensive (tier 2), or Undergraduate Education (Academic Base price - tier 1) categories by APS, either using ratings judged comparable to US Carnegie classifications or the institutional online usage of journals. As of June 1, 2000, the foreign countries with Carnegie-equivalent ratings are Great Britain and Canada.
Government and corporate subscribers will be charged as Carnegie Research Extensive (tier 3).
All new non-US academic subscribers will be charged base price for the first year (tier 1).
The American Physical Society (APS), publisher of Physical Review A-E, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams, Physical Review Online Archive (PROLA) and Reviews of Modern Physics, continues its multi-tier pricing structure. Average price increase for 2002 will be:
Total revenue from subscriptions will be equivalent to an across-the-board price increase of approximately 8%. The new prices reflect continued cancellations, especially of multiple subscriptions in research laboratories, and inflationary cost increases. The APS publishes its journals as a not-for-profit responsibility of the Society and the pricing structure does not change that policy. Recent trends have included significant cancellation of multiple subscriptions by large institutions. This cancellation of multi-le subscriptions is practical because all of the APS journals are available electronically. The multi-tiered pricing represents an attempt to prevent the effect of cancellation of duplicate subscriptions from falling disproportionately onto smaller institutions.
In an effort to reflect usage of the journals by different subscribers, the APS provides the journals to non-research oriented institutions at a lower price than that charged to government, corporate and research intensive academic institutions. There are currently three categories for pricing. The top category contains government and corporate subscribers and Carnegie classification Research Extensive academic institutions and their equivalents. The second category includes Carnegie classification Research Intensive academic institutions and their equivalents. All other academic institutions are placed in the base category. The 2000 Carnegie classifications (http://www.carnegiefoundation.org) will be used for 2002 pricing tiers.
Non-US government and corporate subscribers are charged the same as their US counterparts. However, there is a lack of useful classifications for non-US academic institutions. When a classification is found which is equivalent to the U.S. Carnegie classifications, it is used for pricing. Otherwise, non-US academic institutions are placed into equivalent categories with domestic institutions, and charged accordingly, based on a comparison of their online usage with the median value of usage by the domestic Carnegie categories. A subscriber whose online usage exceeds that of the median of the Carnegie Research institutions is placed in the top category, Tier 3. Those with usage between the medians of the doctoral and the research institutions will be placed in the middle category, Tier 2, and all others placed in the base category, Tier 1. It should be emphasized that the multi-tiered pricing is not an attempt to introduce usage based pricing. Rather, it is a move to put the larger burden for distribution of research information onto the research institutions. Online usage is only used for non-US institutions in an effort to obtain an objective identification of research intensive subscribers. All "new" non-US academic subscribers will be charged the base rate for the first year.
It is recognized that institutional library budgets are under great stress. In order to move towards more cost-effective publishing, the APS offers online-only access to the journal. The online-only option incorporates the three-tiered pricing scheme and the online-only option is priced 15% below the print-with-online package for all tiers. Non-US subscribers avoiding air-freight costs would see an even greater savings. Some institutions wish to maintain electronic copies of their subscriptions on their own servers as a permanent record ("electronic shelving"). For this purpose we have produced a PDF collection of all articles published each year. The files, which can be mounted on local servers and accessed using standard internet browsers, are distributed using CD-ROMs. The CD-ROMs are available at $50 per disc, with a subscription.
Online access is especially attractive option because of the availability of the Physical Review Online Archive (PROLA). PROLA provides access to all of the Physical Review, Physical Review Letters and Reviews of Modern Physics from volumes three years old back to 1893 (the most recent three years are available on the current online journal platforms). PROLA will be continually updated to include all articles published more than three years before the current year. A fully current version of PROLA plus current issues (the past three years) is maintained on servers at the Library of Congress and at the Cornell University Library. The maintenance of PROLA in a current and readily accessible form is a responsibility that the APS has assumed for the community. Access to PROLA is included in the price for the APS packages (APS-All and PR-All) and is available at a modest cost for subscribers of individual journals. PROLA provides access to the backfiles and the cost for PROLA covers maintenance of the archive.
The pricing model of the APS and the movement to full online access represent attempts by the APS to adjust to changes in the scholarly publishing world. The goal is to fulfill the APS mission of promoting the Advancement and Diffusion of the Knowledge of Physics while maintaining a sense of fairness in distributing the costs of that mission. The model was prepared after thorough discussions with member committees of the APS and librarians advising the Society. We recognize that in the current environment any pricing structure has to be continuously reviewed and revised and we welcome a wide discussion of both general issues concerning pricing and the specific policies of the APS.
Any questions, please contact: Barbara Hicks Associate Publisher Tel: 301-209-3202 Email: assocpub@aps.org Thomas J. McIlrath Publisher Tel: 301-209-3221 Email: publisher@aps.org