pay per article

[Sally]

Can you explain how this function works? When we offer it, it seems access is given, once payment is received and apporved, to all articles and for a longer period than 24hours.

[michael]

Hi Sally,

With article purchase enabled, readers without a subscription may buy individual articles from an issue.

Once purchased, readers have permanent access to the article (there is no timeout period).

Purchase is always for a single article and readers should not have access to other subscription-restricted content. If you believe that you've found a bug with this, please provide additional details about your OJS install as well as the configuration options that you are currently using.

Cheers,
Michael

[Sally]

Thanks for this Michael. I'll pass this information on to Joanna, our IT contact. Right now, using pay per article gives payee access to all journal articles plus all back copies (ie as if full subscriber). BUT our difficulty using the ojs subscription option is that our university insists on managing the payment system. So, a subscriber, or pay per article user, will be directed to their payment page and we will only hear about it by email. This is why I am not sure if the problem is with them or with the ojs sytem. I will send your reply to Joanna and get her thoughts about this.
Best,

Sally

[Sally]

Hi Micheal,

Hopes the below information is sufficient:

OJS Version: 2.2.2.0
general
installed On
registry_dir registry
session_cookie_name OJSSID
session_lifetime 30
scheduled_tasks On
disable_path_info On

Do let me know if you need any more information.

Thanks

Joanna

[michael]

Hi Sally,

BUT our difficulty using the ojs subscription option is that our university insists on managing the payment system. So, a subscriber, or pay per article user, will be directed to their payment page and we will only hear about it by email.

Once you receive from your university an email notification of payment for an article purchase, how do you record and register this payment against a specific article in OJS?

Cheers,
Michael

[Sally]

Hi Michael,

Sally and i would like to understand the workflow for the payment per article.

We have check the checkbox for purchase of article in the payment options tab. But how does it link to the purchase of the article?

We have also created a subscription type "Pay per article", though we have notice too that there is no options to choose from to enable the payment per article.

Thanks

Regards,
Joanna

[michael]

Hi Joanna and Sally,

Subscriptions and article purchases are handled differently by OJS.

Subscriptions provide readers with access to the entire contents of an issue (all articles).

Readers without a subscription, however, can buy individual articles of interest.

Subscriptions can be added manually by the Journal or Subscription Manager.

In contrast, at this time article purchase is only available through an online payment method.

We plan to add manual addition of article purchase records in a future release of OJS, but at this time this is not possible.

The default payment method that OJS supports is PayPal. There are, however, additional payment method plugins available in the forum plugin gallery that have been created by various users and institutions. See, for example, the Beanstream and Moneris plugins.

In effect, the online payment plugin needs to communicate with the payment provider and once it receives confirmation of payment for an article can update the article purchase table with the relevant user and article info.

Cheers,
Michael

[Sally]

hi Michael,

Many thanks for this information.
Do you think we can manage to use PayPal for our per article requests alongside the University's payment system for subscriptions? We are required by the University to use their payment system, so if you think a two tiered system will work and we can restrict PayPal to per article payments, we will try to negotiate a dual system with the University.

Cheers,

Sally

[michael]

Hi Sally,

Yes, you should be able to do this.

You'll need to enable online payments via the options on the 'Payments' page. This includes the top-most option under 'General Options,' the currency, as well as the Purchase Article options under 'Reader Fees'. Leave the subscription payments checkbox unchecked since you'll be managing these on your own.

You'll also need to provide your PayPal account info under the 'Fee Payment Methods' tab.

Cheers,
Michael

[Sally]

Hi Michael,
Joanna has been talking to the poeple at our University e-payment collection and they are suggesting that she make changes to our website to by-pass PayPal and insert a function that will distinguish between subscriptions and pay per article. This sounds like a v technical question and we were wondering if we could skype you to discuss it more fully. We are in Singapore, and think you are in Canada, but don't know which part and therefore what the time difference is bewteen us.
So can we skype and if so, please provide the number and a time we can reach you, starting on your Monday.

Cheers,

Sally & Joanna

[michael]

Hi Sally,

The payment system already distinguishes between different types of payments. In effect, each of the options on the main Payments Options page corresponds to a unique payment type in the system.

You should be able to re-use much of the code already available in OJS (and used by the PayPal plugin). The component that will need to be changed is the transaction processing with your university. Once you receive confirmation of payment within OJS, the article purchase tables can be easily updated using the existing code.

As a means to support the work of the PKP, we offer both custom support and programming services (e.g. login to your server, troubleshooting, consulting, etc.). Please feel free to PM me if you'd like to go this route.

Additional info on PKP support prices and agreement terms.

Cheers,
Michael

[newone]

Hi Sally,

With article purchase enabled, readers without a subscription may buy individual articles from an issue.

Once purchased, readers have permanent access to the article (there is no timeout period).

Cheers,
Michael

The logic behind Pay-Per-Article in OJS is off. Giving a user permanent access to an article they only paid once does not work, and cannot work. Why doesn’t OJS have controls to enable editors to limit download for article?

If you look at Apple, you pay for every song you download. So, whether you download the song once or twice, you have to pay for each of the download. This is how it should work in OJS. Ideally, Pay-Per-Article should only allow users to pay for an article and download it once. Whenever a user wants to read that article again, they should pay for it. It is that simple. Additionally, it is not economically sound for editors and publishers that use OJS to manage their journals to provide permanent access to article that a user have only paid ONCE for. This seems like backward engineering for open-access.

Keep in mind that journals that have chosen to use Pay-Per-Article also depend on that revenue for the upkeep of their journal, which includes among other things, editorial service, journal production, technical support, web hosting, marketing, and much more. In addition, you should also be aware that there are politics of knowledge, which determines what journals are funded and what journals are not, what ideas disseminate and what ideas don’t. So, not every journal have the resources to provide permanent access given the operational cost, and not every journal wants to be open-access. Of course, this is a separate conversation.

Let me put it this way. If I hire PKP team to do some work, PKP team charges me a fee for the work. Does that mean that anytime I need that kind of work done, or need any work done on my OJS website, I should get it free? Obviously this will not work for PKP, and it doesn't for work editors or publishers.

Finally, I have found no note on OJS documentation that this is how Pay-Per-Article works. It would be best if such decisions are transparent to users to enable them to make decisions of what will or will not work for their journal.

I hope there is an update to this feature in the future to truly reflect the principle of Pay-Per-Article.

Peace

[newone]

Hi Michael,
Joanna has been talking to the poeple at our University e-payment collection and they are suggesting that she make changes to our website to by-pass PayPal and insert a function that will distinguish between subscriptions and pay per article. This sounds like a v technical question and we were wondering if we could skype you to discuss it more fully. We are in Singapore, and think you are in Canada, but don't know which part and therefore what the time difference is bewteen us.
So can we skype and if so, please provide the number and a time we can reach you, starting on your Monday.

Cheers,

Sally & Joanna

I hope you have resolved the issues. I want to make some general comments and address some questions you raised earlier.

After reading your post, there are many variables to consider first before launching and modifying OJS. I find it rather important to consider usage first with the planning. For example, who is the intended and target audience? Is OJS for the university? Is it for university publication? Is it for students at the university? Are student expected to pay for access? Aside from university preferred method, if it is for students, what is the best method to reach them and increase usage and participation? It is always easy to hire a programmer to do the programming part, but in my experience, without solid objectives, you find yourself running around to address all issues.

When you enable Purchase Article(Pay-Per-View) in OJS, users only see the article they have purchase. They cannot see any other article. If they tried, OJS will tell them to pay the Pay-Per-View fee. Now, if you use subscription in OJS, payments are handled different from OJS to PayPal (default option for payment transaction). The way subscription in works in OJS, users that pay the subscription fee will have access to all the articles in the journal. I should also mention how payment works. Let’s say you want someone to pay $20/month for your OJS website, when they make payments on Payal, they will be asked to pay the cost for entire year, which will be $240 ($20 x 12 months). The last time I checked, users cannot pay month by month, but you can easily set up recurring subscriptions in PayPal, and you can manually add the person to the list of paid subscribers. But this feature sounds like it is already integrated in the university payment system. Well, there are certainly perks for users to pay everything immediately, with the recurring payment through PayPal, you have to have some mechanism to disable access once users stop subscription.

I hope everything turned out well.

[Sally]

The questions posed are extremely good and deserve a comprehansive reply.
Our journal is striving to become international, primarily serving our region (SE Asia, which is huge). We started with a grant and need to become self-sustaining. Because of this, we decided to require subscription to access the journal, keeping the price as low as we possibly could.
Because we are an academic journal the market tends to dictate payment options and having a pay-per-article option (along side a subscription option) seems to be a norm. Therefore we are pursuing this option.
Now comes the technical problem (where my eyes glaze over and I understand few words the are written/said). Our University insists on our using their payment system which is written in "dot net" and doesn't "speak" with the ojs system. Therefore there is a time lag between when a person pays a subscription and their ability to access it.
The University system records the transaction and gets information to me, but it doesn't give me any means of getting the person's contact details. This becomes much worse when a person wants to pay per article. Normally people in both situations contact me by email and I can manually send the person the pdf of the article they bought and enroll the subscriber. But this is a highly unsatsfactory situation.
The University informs me the only solution they can find is to have someone either write their page in "php" or write our website in "dot net". We have been trying to get people that write in "php" quite for this work but have found that incredibly difficult and so are returning to you. The lastest discussion we had with consutants external to hte University say their "php" writer is tied up for an 18mo contract. Basically, I see the problem lies with our having to use the University's collection system but they are adamant and we have no other option than to customise their system to fit within ojs.
We would welcome any alternatives you can suggest or other solutions you can identify.
If there are none, then may I ask you to give us an estimate of the cost for this customising work. Our adminsitrator will need this for our finance people. We have a copy of your terms, but I note the cost per hour is as of 31Dec 2010; please advise any changes.
Many thanks for your on-going help and support in this matter.
Sally

[newone]

I have not been around sometime.

Are you addressing those questions to OJS? It sounds like you might.

Hope your issue is resolved.