What Would It Cost to Buy Everything? | The Scholarly Kitchen

" ... I had imagined what I thought was a fairly straightforward use case. Here is that use case. Let’s imagine a new company that seeks to create a business around data analytics of research material. To do this it needs to have access (including the rights for text- and data-mining) to all the research material. One way to get access is to seek permission from all the publishers, but as there are thousands of journals publishers, this would be arduous and take forever. Another way, which may not be legitimate (I have no opinion about the copyright issues on this, so please, spare me in the comments), would be to cobble together access to a number of research libraries; presumably when aggregated, these libraries, with some specialist outfits thrown in, would be able to provide access to everything. But that also would be hard to do, not only because of determining which libraries were necessary to put into the pool but also to have a legitimate registration with all these libraries–and to be able to download literally millions of articles from them without someone putting up a STOP! sign. Theoretically, you could work around these problems if you had a big enough checkbook; you could simply buy (or lease, as many people reminded me) access and then text-mine to your and your robot’s hearts’ content. And this is where it gets complicated. The first question is: When you say everything, would you please submit a list of titles? I had assumed that the number would be around 25,000, a number that gets tossed around all the time, but whose authority I should have challenged.  After posing this question on liblicense, I got answers that ranged from 13,000 to close to 50,000. I am making no attempt to reconcile this, but it is clear that we can’t talk about buying everything if we don’t know what everything consists of ... A second complicating question in determining how much everything would cost is that backfiles are important, too, so the cost of accessing those documents has to be added in. It’s pretty clear that it would be hopeless to try to add all this up, though across-the-board subscriptions to EBSCO, ProQuest, and JSTOR will get you a good part of the way ... As one drills into this question, the number of variables grows ... And then there is the interesting matter of the pricing of Big Deals. As some commentators have noted, pricing can be opaque–in part because of confidentiality clauses in contracts, but also because much pricing for Big Deals was based on historical pricing for print publications. An academic library that signed onto such a package years ago may be paying quite a bit less than a library that entered the market today. There is, in other words, no single answer to the question.  Still, people tried to come up with reasonable estimates. The lowest was $13 million, the highest $85 million. The number I found most persuasive, in large part because I know the individual personally who offered it up, was a range of $25-$30 million, to pay for current issues (no backfiles) of about 30,000 journals. But in truth we don’t know ..."