From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 22:20:07 -0500

At the risk of being tiresome, may I pose the question another way?

It is understood that there is no answer to the original question
because pricing depends on many factors.  But what would it cost to
purchase all of the journals for *your* institution? In other words,
since pricing varies by institution, consortia deals, etc., one way to
cut through all this is not to have one answer but to have, say,
1,700, one for each of the 4-year institutions in the U.S.  Anyone
care to take a shot at that?

This prompts a follow-on question: If an institution knows what it
spends now on journals, and if it can make a reasonable estimate of
what it would cost to have all of the journals, what percentage of the
total does each institution have access to?

I am simply fascinated by the comments that have been made here.

Joe Esposito

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 9:14 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:01:48 +0000
>
> The difficulty of reaching a definitive answer is, presumably, exactly why
> the ALA stopped maintaining its index of journal prices
>
> Sally
>
> Sally Morris
> Email:  [log in to unmask]
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 12:39:15 -0500
>
> I am responding here to Jan's note, but I have also received a number of
> responses to my question offline from people who don't wish to have their
> institutional affiliation disclosed.
>
> Yes, it's negotiable, as Jan says.  So the question could better be put this
> way:  What is the retail price for all the subscription journals (that are
> available in electronic form), and how much would a customer actually have
> to pay for them?
>
> This brings us to the question of the category of customer.  Would an
> academic library pay more or less than an individual, than a company?
> Would there be a distinction between a large company and a raw start-up?
>
> Then there is the matter of the number of journals.  I thought (silly
> me!) that the number was around 25,000, a figure I picked up form reading
> Stevan Harnad's many posts.  But one person commented that the number is
> perhaps twice that.  How to resolve this?  How many scholarly journals are
> there that are peer-reviewed and sold in digital form?
>
> A related question is domain.  I was looking for the figure for all
> disciplines, but one comment I received addressed STM specifically.
> How many HSS journals are there, how many in STM?
>
> And all of this is for current issues.  The backfiles still loom over this
> discussion.
>
> I have gotten a couple estimates for the total cost, but I am going to
> withhold them for a bit in order not to influence anyone else who wants to
> take a crack at this.  And I hope more people do.
>
> Does it not seem odd that these figures are not readily available somewhere?
>
> Now, as for Jan's comment that a journal is a bundle, well, that would get
> us onto a long and perhaps unproductive path.  My view is that a journal is
> a bundle is the same sense that a house is.  In my house there are TVs,
> tables, chairs, iPhones, sinks, and everything else you would expect.  All
> of this was purchased "off the shelf," but still somehow it is *our* house;
> it feels like ours, and people who visit feel that way, too.  I know
> personality and subjectivity are the abominations of the modern world, but I
> am a cheerful troglodyte and have remarked upon the personality of a
> publisher:
>
> http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/06/03/the-personality-of-a-publisher
> /
>
> Switching metaphors, let's consider the original version of the classic
> science fiction film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."  How does the hero
> know whether the woman the he is in love with is human or an alien? He
> kisses her, and all is revealed.  Is a journal merely a bundle?  Kiss and
> tell.
>
> Joe Esposito