From: Anna Daniel <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 11:55:23 +1000

my two cents would be to step beyond subscriptions and broaden this to
cover uni-wide spending towards publishers, rather than Library spend.
Some publishers (e.g. Pearson) now bypass Libraries and deal direct
with academics/departments and sell 'content' rather than journals.
They are selling a lot more than 'subscriptions' (digital or
otherwise) which may just be interpreted as journals. I think opening
the terms in that way will reveal interesting findings. It could be
requested as a (1) FOI request to CFOs of Universities on spend
towards specific publishers PLUS (2) FOI request to collective library
purchasing bodies (e.g. in Australia to CAUL).

for example: http://fortune.com/2015/01/21/everybody-hates-pearson/

includes in the US: "analysts think Pearson controls some 60% of the
North American testing market" ; "Pearson has a $468 million contract
to provide tests and educational materials" in Texas ; plus 'services'
they charge uni's for.  Agree that pricing is market based rather than
cost based.

It seems that while the OA movement is catching up on trying to
measure the subscription question, commercial publishers are diving
deeper into entrenched roles within academia (in and beyond Libraries)
with high switching costs for uni's

kind regards

Anna


On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 10:51 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From:  Dugald McGlashan <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 14:49:04 +1100
>
> Would Ted Bergstrom have any data (cc'd)? I can't see contain pricing
> data in the excel sheet at journalprices.com but it does rate value,
> implying the data are somewhere. It lists 10,100 journals.
>
> Also from http://journalprices.com/explanation2013.html:
>
> "Sources of Price Information -
> When possible, we have obtained subscription prices for the 2013
> edition of the journals charged to academic libraries located in the
> United States. (Prices quoted only in foreign currencies are converted
> to United States Dollars using the Currency Converter at current
> exchange rates.) The prices of most journals were retrieved from
> publisher's price lists, journal web sites and direct correspondence
> with journal editors and publishers. We found some prices for which
> other methods failed, by referring to Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory.
>   If we could not find the 2013 price, but had either the 2012 price
> or the 2014 price, we used that price. Whenever available, we used the
> price of an institutional “online only” subscription. If institutional
> online-only subscriptions were not available, but a
> “print-plus-online” edition was available, we used that. If
> institutional online subscriptions are not available in any form, we
> used the price of the print edition. For journals that are priced with
> a “tiered structure”, we used the price charged to large,
> single-campus universities with enrollment of 25,000 or larger."
>
> ----
>
> Dugald McGlashan
> Co-Founder, INLEXIO
> inlexio.com