News / Comments / The cost of knowledge in Germany - bjoern.brembs.blog

"Evidence is the basis of all science. Evidence should also be the basis of all policies. Concerning scholarly communication, one central piece of evidence is the cost of knowledge, i.e., how much are we spending on our communication system and the associated question of whether we get what we pay for. One point that has always irked me was that I couldn't find any reliable figures as to how much we (i.e., our university libraries) are actually spending on the journals we use. The data from the American Research Libraries is behind a paywall and I'm not even sure this data covers all the university libraries in the US. The data for the German libraries are not behind a paywall, however. At the German Library Statistics, you can get all the info you want. You can even query their database, very cool! You can check every one of the 250 university libraries and how much they spent on what in which year. Here are a few things I found out: German libraries spent in 2011 [1] 170 million € on books [2] 130 million € on subscriptions This amounts to an average of about 660k € in subscription costs for each library (I did not check the distribution to see if I should have calculated the median instead). Given a conservative estimate of publisher profits of around 30%, this suggests that each German library paid about 220k € to publishers' shareholders in 2011. Obviously, this will vary from library to library. For instance, our library here in Regensburg paid about 700k € in 2011 towards publishers' profits..."