Usage-based pricing

We’ve received a question about our recently published best practice on reporting to multiple identities.

Publisher platforms often offer multiple authentication methods to end users. Multi-id is great when it allows a user to access content, but it has reporting drawbacks. We recommend that publishers link a user’s activity, and report all COUNTER metrics, to all relevant institutions. The fallback position is to restrict users to a single institutional identity. Single identities are easier for reporting, but restricted users might not be able to access everything they’re entitled to read.

So what’s the question? Put simply, the librarian asked us what happens when licence costs are based on usage that is reported to multiple institutions.

COUNTER sets the standard for usage metrics. We don’t think it is appropriate for us to specify business practices and/or pricing models. When it comes to pricing, transparency matters as much for usage-based pricing as for any other models. Publishers who allow users to have multiple identities they should explain how that affects their usage-based pricing calculations. Because transparency is important, we’ll add a flag for whether multi-id is in place when we develop new Registry features later this year.