Follow the money – what really matters when choosing a journal (UPDATED) | Dynamic Ecology

"Here I am exclusively focused on what makes a journal a “good” citizen of the research community and then you can (and should!) decide for yourself how to weight that in a manner appropriate to your career stage and goals. This is a complex story and I’ve put a lot of research into so I hope you’ll bear with me through this admittedly long post. If you are attuned to the blogosphere/twitter-ville you will notice there has been an enormous amount of energy championing the idea that good=open access and emotions on all sides ... So where does following the money take us with academic journal publishing? For starters we know three basic things about the publishing industry ... I now want to pursue the revenue side a little bit. The best data I can find comes from American university libraries (which has an organization that surveys its members every year) ... The total $ spent by libraries on books and the cost per book (triangles and squares respectively) have tracked the rate of inflation closely (yellow) and as a result the number of books purchased has remained relatively constant (although the baseline year of 1986 represents a high point for libraries that we are only now returning to). Now look at journals. The cost per journal (red squares) skyrocketed from 1986-2000. To this point the cost per journal went up 250% while inflation only went up 50% – i.e. costs increased at a rate of 5x inflation. Total expenditures on journals (=revenues for publishers) did basically the same thing until 2000. In 2000 the $/journal plummeted while the total expenditures continued on basically a straight line increase.  You can probably guess the story here. Its when online publishing came home to roost. The publishers will tell you that eliminating print saved a lot of money driving down costs, but that is hooey – print and mailing is a small fraction of the total costs (see piece by EEReditor Rosenzweig). The real story is that the publishers started “bundling” – libraries instead of picking their journals were sold bundles of 100s of journals they had not subscribed to before. This was essentially free to the publishers since the marginal cost of delivering an extra online journal to a library is zero. In principle libraries could still buy single subscriptions but the costs of single subscriptions were so expensive the bundles were the only practical option. You might say (and the publishers did say) 'what a win for libraries' – more journals at less cost. But that statement is false – look at total expenditures on journals – it is still going up at 4-5x the rate of inflation. Even during the Great Recession of 2008-2010 when university and library budgets were decimated the publishers managed to keep revenue flat (the only such period of time in the 25 years of data). When you’re extracting increasingly more dollars at 5x the rate of inflation you are not helping libraries win! As evidence, the proportion of money libraries spend on books vs journals has dropped from 43% in 1986 to 23% in 2005 ... Where has this extra revenue gone? Well the balance must hold – revenue equals the sum of all the expense centers. The main cost is labor for production which almost by definition cannot have gone up much faster than inflation (in the long run wages go up by inflation and improved productivity but not more or you’re in an inflation spiral). In fact this same period has seen a great deal of outsourcing to India and other countries and speaking from personal experience, the overall quality of production services like typesetting and proofing have gone down. So I suspect these costs have actually decreased. The other costs are too small to really matter and in any case have mostly gone up at the rate of inflation at most (paper and web programming are all highly competitive markets). That leaves one great big screaming slot for all the extra revenue to go – profits! ... "