The Centre for Policy Related Statistics (CvB) works continually to innovate its service and processes. We will be switching to a new tariff structure on 1 January 2012, and this may affect you microdata project(s). The change in the tariff structure has been discussed by the recently founded customer council.
The design of the new tariff structure provides a better representation of the relationship between our activities and the costs involved. This will result in a substantial decrease in the monthly costs for remote access PCs, and an increase in monthly project costs. The new tariff structure is not a cost-increasing measure; the total costs charged by Statistics Netherlands, summed over all our customers, will not increase. But there may be differences in the total costs per project or per customer.
Projects will be divided into four categories: small, medium, large and extra large. This classification is based on the complexity of the project and thus the amount of work involved for the CvB to set up and support it . The classification is based on the number of microdatasets used in the project and the number of active researchers. Only few projects will qualify as extra large, and customised arrangements will be made for these.
In the new tariff structure, the CvB will charge a fee for starting up a project, and subsequently a monthly fee for support. The use of additional software packages such as SAS and Gauss will be charged separately. Changes to existing projects (addition of microdatasets, addition of researchers) are relatively time-consuming, and will therefore be charged per request.
In order to provide insight into the new tariffs and services we have drawn up a catalogue of services, summing up all the services and tariffs for on-site and remote access (OS/RA) projects.
We shall contact customers with existing projects separately in the next few months. Changes in monthly costs for ongoing projects will probably be small.