Processing a Query and Its Costs

The costs of an online search are composed of communication costs and host fees. Host fees are usually divided into connect time costs per minute and search fees (the latter only with a few databases) and costs for document display. There is however a trend to Pricing for Information, with declining connect time costs and, instead, increasing costs for document display. This pricing concept is convenient for irregular searchers since they usually require more time for developing an optimized search profile. 

At present, the usual connect time costs amount to 2 to 4 US, the citation fee is between 1 and 3 US. Often, document fees for fact files are higher because their pricing depends on the number of fields retrieved. As a consequence, access to a single Beilstein document is likely to amount to several hundred US.  

Search technique and form of retrieval with these databases will be explained in detail in Sects. 7.10 and 7.11. 

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