Does my university get billed every time I access a paper?

Question

I do not keep a folder on my computer with the hundreds of PDFs of the scientific papers I read, but rather whenever I need a paper I just go and download it from the publisher's website. Of course I access via my institution so there is no charge.

There are papers I access multiple times, and recently this got me thinking: is the university paying a flat fee for the journal (or conference proceedings), or is it billed directly when I access the paper? And in the latter case, if I access it multiple times, will the university be billed again?

I honestly have no idea how these deals work and could not find information, but if the latter case is true, I feel there should be better communication by the institutions so we can adopt better caching strategies.

Answer 1

Most large universities have subscriptions that allow their staff unlimited access to the journals to which they subscribe. Some smaller institutions have different arrangements: when I worked for a small research institute with only about 100 scientists, they had full subscriptions to only a few journals. For others, they instead had a publisher subscription that gave them a limited number of tokens for journal access, and a token was used up each time we accessed an article.

Answer 2

Even in the situation that Allure describes where there is a flat fee for subscription, the number of articles downloaded from various venues may well be kept track of, and this information used to justify to the administration that it is worth subscribing to a given venue.

Consequently, though there may not be a 1-1 cost associated with accessing a given article, in practice we can associated more downloads from a given venue with a higher probability of that venue being retained by your libraries, and furthermore with a willingness to pay a higher fee to do so (since this increases the bargaining power of the publisher).

Whether or not these tracking mechanisms are granular enough to recognize multiple downloads by a given user is beyond my knowledge and probably varies by institution and venue.

Answer 3

No

Assuming your university subscribes to the journal, you get full access until the subscription lapses. It's not dissimilar to, e.g., you subscribing to The Wall Street Journal. You don't pay a fee every time you read an article there.

Answer 4

Even if your institution has unlimited access at flat rate pricing, it might still be a good idea to keep a local copy of anything that's currently essential to your work. If you have the copy locally, you have it. Otherwise, there may be the possibility that your institution decides to no longer subscribe to a particular journal. Another factor to consider for students, particularly near the end of their degree progress, is that sometimes the need to access articles extends past their classification as a student as far as their institution is concerned and eligibility to access your institution's subscriptions may be cut off.

Answer 5

As others have noted, the general guide is that libraries subscribe to bulk packages that contain sets of journals with a desired level of unrestricted access to all articles within any journal in the packaged set. The purchase models that are available are set by the journals that distribute the copyrighted content, not by the libraries that wish to provide downstream access to that same content.

An alternative case to your case is worth noting. By downloading articles directly from your library each time rather than storing them locally after a one time download, you may be skewing the library statistics at your institution to favor your specific journals. By specific example, our librarians have noted to us as faculty (and to our students) that, in addition to considering our direct requests for expanded access to currently restricted journal sets, they also review download statistics from journals in each budget cycle to help make decisions on which journals to cut or keep. Perhaps your contribution is in the noise, or perhaps it will matter. The statistics should be available from your library.

Finally, as far as ... "there should be better communication ...", I have experienced only help and positive feedback when I contact my library administration (e.g. library dean) to ask for clarifications or even to suggest an update be made to their Website with better clarity on such information as you note.