An economic research study that has been published first online
by the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences"
{PNAS} reveals that the secret deals that universities have with journal
publishers appears to cause significant differences in the prices
paid for the same journals (Note: by significant I don't statistically,
rather, I means bucks, such as paying almost twice as much for
the same material). A number of mass media outlets have
picked up on this research and one reasonable account is given
by "ScienceInsider"; see:
http://news.sciencemag.org/economics/2014/06/how-much-did-your-university-pay-your-journals
The original journal article can be access here if your institution
has a subscription to PNAS:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/11/1403006111
The data that they used has also been made available in an
Excel spreadsheet:
news.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Bergstrom.xlsx
I've browsed through the article but it is going to require a closer
reading to really understand what is going on. But there are
a few comments I'd like to make now:
(1) The agreements for journal bundles are supposed to be secret
and some universities would not provide the relevant information.
For public institutions, the authors filed Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) claims to access this information. One publisher
brought suit against the request made to the Washington State
University and two publishers (the prior one and another)
brought suit against the request made to the University of Texas
System. In both cases it was ruled that copies of the contracts
had to be released. I'm not sure what was done for private
institutions that refused to provide their contracts.
(2) The analyses focus on universities that grant the Ph.D. or
the Master's degree (i.e., no undergraduate only institutions).
They used the old Carnegie Foundation ranking of institutions:
(a) Research I: traditionally, these are Ph.D. granting institutions
that have the highest level of grant funded research (above
a certain threshold dollar amount)
(b) Research II: comparable to Research I but with grant funding
below the threshold
(c) Maser's: institutions that grant the Master's degree as it highest
degree.
The authors do point out that the Carnegie foundation does not
presently use these distinctions (they changed it in 2000 and
again in 2005) but most researchers are familiar with the older
classification.
(3) One way to evaluate whether subscribing to a journal is
cost effective is to calculate the "cost per citation", that is,
the subscription cost of the journal divided by the number of
citations it receives -- citations appear to be based on the
"Web of Science"/Journal Citation Reports database. The
authors acknowledge that for journals not appearing in this
database, they used the Scimago database which is based
on Elsevier's Scopus database. Presumably an institution
would prefer to subscribe to journals that have (a) high
citation rates and (b) low subscription costs. However,
this might cause low citation journals to cease publication
which is why a publisher would want to bundle the journals
together (high and low citation journals) in order to keep
certain journals alive. However, it may be to an institution's
advantage to "pick and choose" which journals it really
wants, given its budget.
As I've mentioned above, a close reading of the article is
warranted. One conclusion that might be reached is that there
should be more transparency about the deals publishers make
with university libraries.
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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