97% of US schools cannot afford Elsevier journals

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“Let me explain how I arrived at this conclusion. First, Elsevier is rather protective of its prices. It is common for them to include a confidentiality clause in their contracts with libraries which prohibits the library from disclosing Elsevier’s prices. Despite this, the folks behind journalprices.com managed to legally discover some pricing information, although Elsevier sued at least one university in an effort to keep their prices secret. Thanks to journalprices.com, I was able to find this great summary of academic journal prices. The prices I quote below are all from this document... The average price of an Elsevier journal was $2248 per year. According to Elsevier’s journal index, they have 2638 different journals (1360 of which were sampled in the above price summary). So a full-cost purchase of all journals would be about $6 million per year. In practice, I understand that libraries actually purchase bundles of journals at a reduced price... sources have told me that bundle prices are set based on the cumulative full-price cost of the subset of journals that a library actually wants to buy. For example, if a library cares about the best 15% of journals (about 400) from Elsevier, then it’s very likely that they’ll cost more than the mean $2248/journal. The most expensive journal from Elsevier I’ve found so far cost over $20,000. With such high-end costs, it’s quite possible that the top 400 journals might run close to $3 million, so that a bundle deal including those journals could be labeled as a good value at this price. (This $3 million figure is an educated guess, and my 97% statistic above does not depend on it.)... What can we do about it? We can decrease the need for Elsevier journals by refraining from submitting our work to them... This is the motivation behind thecostofknowledge.com, a grass-roots campaign inspired by Tim Gowers’s stand against Elsevier... At the same time, we can give researchers more publication options by supporting open access and free-to-copy publishing initiatives. Some examples are Scholastica, OpenRePub, and peer evaluation — all sites created to support freedom of knowledge for research. Publishing in the arxiv is a great way to share work...”

Link:

http://tylerneylon.com/b/archives/136

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.libraries oa.peer_review oa.arxiv oa.costs oa.prices oa.budgets oa.journals

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 15:10

Date published:

02/10/2012, 17:42