From: Ted Bergstrom <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 20:58:27 -0800 Hello all, Yes, I collected about 10,000 journal prices for 2013 in order to construct the cost effectiveness indexes that we publish on www.journalprices.com Preston McAfee and I have this data in a spreadsheet. We tried to find prices for all of the journals that were included in the 2011 ISI Journal Citation Index. We found prices for a total of about 10,400 journals. Of these, 8,836 had positive prices, and 1558 were available online for free. There were also about 550 journals for which we never were able to find prices. The sum of the prices we found for these journals was $13,774,031. The text that Dugald quotes below explains relevant details of what we used. Notice that this is what a large research-oriented university would pay for a la carte subscriptions to the lot. If you want to make a guess of what a large university would pay for all of this stuff if it purchased bundled packages wherever available, you could make use of a recent article in PNAS, Paul Courant and I, along with Preston McAfee and Mike Williams, where we published a list of the amounts paid in 2010 by a large sample of universities for Big Deal packages from some major publishers. This paper also shows the sum of the a la carte prices for the full collections. A freely available copy of this paper can be found at http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.html and the supplement with much of the data is at: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/11/1403006111/suppl/DCSupplemental Of course purchasing subscription access to all published journals would be an absurd waste of money since our figures show that if you shopped by price per citation, you could access journals that have 95% of the citations available from this full collection for about 60% of the cost of the full collection and you could get 98% of the citations for about 70% of the cost of the full bundle. Even Harvard doesn't try to buy all journals. In fact, Harvard only purchases about half of Elsevier's 2000+ journals. Cheers, Ted On 1/27/15 4:51 PM, LIBLICENSE 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