Creating a consumer market for scholarly journals

The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative method for individuals to obtain documents using credits supplied by their institution to purchase at article level.

The paper draws on the experience and knowledge gained from the extensive work that CIBER has done in analyzing the usage of large‐scale journal databases.

It was found that such an approach has many advantages over the current librarian‐driven process.

Digital content is variously neglected, abused, free, and expensive. This paper is as much about stimulating some new thinking in this important area as about setting out a new scholarly communication market model.