PEAK is a collaborative effort at the University of Michigan involving librarians, technologists, and economists. As a service, the University of Michigan serves as a host for all 1100 journals of Elsevier and provides access both to the University of Michigan community and approximately a dozen other PEAK participant institutions. As a research project, PEAK is exploring several pricing dimensions, including different product bundles as well as nonlinear pricing opportunities afforded by electronic access. Per article-individual users can purchase unlimited access to a specific article for a fixed price. One important, and somewhat unusual feature of the per article and generalized subscription options, is that the user purchases access to the article for the life of the project.
Nonlinear pricing refers to a broad class of schemes in which revenue increases nonlinearly.
Like bundling, nonlinear pricing may fit well in the world of electronic publishing since recovery of fixed publishing costs can be spread over more revenue-generating products due to the new services that can be created. The base participation fee also provides participants with unlimited search access to the entire database and free access to articles from 1996. Aggregate, institutional level usage data are provided to Elsevier. The PEAK research group will be analyzing the usage data, the purchasing data, and the data collected from user and librarian surveys. The results of these analyses will be made publicly available through our web site and through scholarly publications.