> As for counting up how many articles a library gets each year, I admit I
> never realized that this would be a hard number to get to.
One reason it’s hard is that individual journals publish different numbers of articles per year, and the typical mid-sized research library subscribes to thousands of journals each year – some of them in large subject packages or Big Deals, but hundreds or even thousands more as individual subscriptions. (Notwithstanding the popular myth that academic libraries no longer carry individual journal subscriptions.) It might be relatively easy to say how many articles the library has paid for in a given year from any one of those journals, but gathering the data for all of them would be a real slog. (Not complicated work, but a lot of work.)
Another reason is that a very large number of the articles we pay for each year are provided by third-party vendors like EBSCO and ProQuest in the form of aggregated journal packages. The interesting thing about these packages is that their content changes over time; a journal may be included this year but replaced by a different one the next year—or even in the middle of the year. We’re fine with that ambiguity because we don’t count on these packages as reliable delivery systems for particular journals—we use them as enormous bags of articles. So the point of Academic Search Premier isn’t that it’s a good way to get reliable, continuous access to Biology Journal X, but that it’s a reliable source of good biology articles. As long as the package works well as a general undergraduate research tool, we don’t care that much about which particular journals are included. (We do care somewhat, but not the way we would if we were subscribing to those journals specifically or in a subject package.)
These are just two of the factors that make it difficult for a library to say, in any given year, how many articles it has paid for.
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Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2018 14:31:25 -0500
Ann,
Thanks for wrestling with the question. I will provide some background, but first let me say that after your reference to Winnie the Pooh, I reminisced a bit with Jefferson Airplane's "House at Pooneil Corners":
Makes you just want to drop acid, doesn't it?
Back to the article count. I have been working on a project to facilitate a negotiation, and have observed that neither party understands the key issues of the other side. For publishers, for example, the essential questions are: How much does it cost us to publish one article (the editorial cost, which is the big one) and, How much do we make for each article we publish? That last question is revenue across all customers combined. For the large commercial publishers that figure is usually in the $5,000-$6,000. For not-for-profit publishers it is usually much higher. Mega-properties (Nature, Science) occupy an entirely different realm. (Note: revenue is not the same thing as profit.) The biggest driver of revenue per article is not price but the reach of global distribution (because more customers means more revenue).
My back-of-the-envelope estimate for the price for the customer per article is around $1.75. That's for the big publishers. It is much higher for not-for-profits. Note that I am not including other revenue streams in this (APCs, advertising, reprints, etc.). It is that $1.75 figure that I am trying to validate (or invalidate).
This metric is different from cost per use (a good measure for librarians, but less meaningful for publishers). I would drop the multiple use category and only include the cost per article for direct sales by the publisher; and the reason for that is simply that that is the way publishers look at their numbers.
As for counting up how many articles a library gets each year, I admit I never realized that this would be a hard number to get to.
Joe Esposito
On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 7:09 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2018 18:50:37 -0400
Joe, an interesting question, but it looks like one that Winnie-the-Pooh would be poohzled over for quite some time. There's so much data we don't have to hand. Adding up the payments is probably the easiest part, (1) but how to find out how many articles are published by those providers? and (2) all kinds of secondary questions arise, like: do you count the articles anyone in your institution has clicked on or all of them? (3) if the used ones, do you count each instance of use? (4) what about getting the New England Journal of Medicine (or AAAS) from multiple sources? and so on.
We'll leave aside the question of utility for the moment and just think of this as some kind of ... data point. But, if well defined, one could do interesting things with it...
If someone has ideas about some piece of such a calculation that can be readily done, speak up. Cheers, Ann Okerson
On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 12:32 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: JJE Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 28 May 2018 22:11:57 -0500
The use of list prices in discussions of journals is at best irrelevant and probably cynical.
May I raise a data question? What is the cost per article across a library's many vendors? I am not suggesting that this is a good or useful metric; I am simply attempting to ascertain what that figure is. So, for example, if a library gets 1 million articles for $1 million, the cost per article would be $1. Are these figures commonly calculated? Are there any publicly available summaries?
Thank you.
Joe Esposito