They then asked each institution to indicate the maximum price at which it would participate. Enough responded to drive down the average price by at least one-third of what each school would have paid individually. A more complicated version of this is the weighted FTE discount, in which undergraduates at four-year schools are considered one FTE while students at community colleges are counted as a fraction. This model is proposed for the multiconsortial Oxford English Dictionary license that the Online Computer Library Center is brokering. Because of overtaxed acquisition budgets of two-year institutions, Oxford University Press is offering a lower FTE price in hopes of higher participation.
Some publishers offer discounts based on the number of participating institutions .
Small state consortia, like the Utah Academic Library Consortium, with its 11 colleges and universities, can end up at a disadvantage. When only three members of its consortium expressed interest in a database, the University of Utah found itself unable to take advantage of any discounts. The vendor required each multi-campus university to pay full price for the first two campuses. One of the most complicated pricing plans calculates a library's digital bill based on the cost of its print subscriptions. In this model, often called print plus , a publisher requires a school to pay for its print subscriptions and, for a typical surcharge of 15 percent, delivers the titles online.