From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 11:11:15 +0100

It has been noted repeatedly how much these costs would fall if libraries
would drop print journals entirely. Yet they don't - why not?

Sally

Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
Email:  [log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Odlyzko <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2013 22:38:04 -0500

The latest report from ARL, published last fall, "ARL Statistics 2010-2011,"
shows (from chart on p. 5, in the Overview section, there is much more
detail in the 180-page report) that among the university members of ARL,
materials (books, serials, databases, ...) consumed 42.8% of the budgets.
For the historical evolution of this figure (which has grown, from 33% in
the 1989-1990 report), see the tables and figures in my recent paper, "Open
Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general
commerce,"

   http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

The 42.8% figure actually overstates how much is spent on acquisitions.
ARL statistics do not take into account things like employee benefits, as
well as (in many cases) maintenance of buildings, and so on.  Those appear
to add another 25% to the ARL-defined library budgets, so that acquisitions
are more like 33% of the total cost of ARL libraries.

An extreme case is that of the Library of Congress, which had a budget of
$690 M, of which $28.4 M went for acquisitions.  The next highest budget was
that of Harvard, where out of $109 M, $17.6 M went for acquisitions.

So yes, library internal expenses are far higher in general (although
perhaps not for Mayo) than acquisition spending, and that seems to be key to
scholarly publishing economics.

Andrew