The Peak Experiment : Usage and Economic Behavior

For the past two years, researchers in Economics at the University of Michigan have worked in collaboration with the University of Michigan Library to design and run an experiment in Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge. PEAK is both a production service for electronic journal delivery and an opportunity for experimental pricing research that provides access to the 1,100+ journals published by Elsevier Science. These journals include much of the leading research in the physical, life and social sciences. The project provides an opportunity for universities and other research institutions to have electronic access to a large number of journals, access that allows for fast sophisticated searching, nearly instantaneous document delivery, and new possibilities for subscriptions. In this article -- the first of two parts -- we report on the problem, the institutional context, our production system and the design of our research experiment. In the companion piece [URL to be inserted when available] we report some of the preliminary results