From: Ellen Finnie <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 15:11:11 +0000

Ted, it’s great to see you continuing your journal cost/effectiveness work
– I’ve been looking for updates via your journal pricing site, and am
pleased to hear the important work continues.



I think the cost per citation metric is a good one to include, along with
potentially cost per page, if that is still calculable and meaningful (I
think you had some comparisons of nonprofit pubs v for profit on that
measure on your prior site, if I recall correctly?



I would also flag what Sally said about the unpaywall tool. We’ve been
following the development of that tool closely and with keen interest.
   There seems to be considerable overlap in the projects and it could be
good to distinguish/coordinate these significant efforts.



Thanks very much for your work in this arena –

Ellen



____

Ellen Finnie

Co-Interim Associate Director for Collections

Head, Scholarly Communications & Collections Strategy

MIT Libraries

P 617 253 8483

[log in to unmask]

http://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly






From: Ted Bergstrom <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2019 13:10:17 -0800

Negotiations between Elsevier and the University of California system over
open access and pricing seem to have reached a stalemate, and the UC no
longer has the Elsevier Big Deal.   Currently,  no UC campus  subscribes to
any Elsevier journals. If the UC chooses not to reenter the Big Deal, the
UC campus libraries will probably find it worthwhile to subscribe to some
Elsevier journals.  Which ones should they choose?



A UCSB student, Zhiyao Ma, and I are developing a little tool that we hope
will  help UC librarians in  making cost-effective selections of Elsevier
journals for subscription.  The UC has   download statistics for each
Elsevier journal at each  of its campuses.  Elsevier posts *a la carte*
subscription prices for each of its journals.  Our tool allows one to
select a cost per download threshold and obtain a list of journals that
meet this criterion, along with their total cost.  It also allows for
separate thresholds to be used for different disciplines.  You can check
out the current version at  https://yaoma.shinyapps.io/Elsevier-Project/



Since this project is still under way, we would be interested in any
suggestions from librarians about how to make this tool more broadly
useful.  Extending this tool to make comparisons among journals from
multiple publishers is an obvious step. However, we are dubious about the
value of download statistics for cross-publisher comparisons.  There is
evidence that download counts substantially overstate usage, because of
repeated downloads of the same article by the same users, and that the
amount of double-counting varies systematically by publisher.  This is
discussed in  a couple of papers of which I am a coauthor.



"Looking under the Counter for Overcounted Downloads" (with Kristin
Antelman and Richard Uhrig)

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vf2k2p0



and



"Do Download counts reliably measure journal usage: Trusting the fox to
count your hens". (with Alex Wood-Doughty and Doug Steigerwald)

https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/17824/19653



Instead of using download data, we could construct a similar calculator
using price per recent citation as a measure of cost-effectiveness.  We
have found that the ratio of downloads to citations differ significantly
between disciplines.    So it is probably appropriate for cost per citation
thresholds to  differ among disciplines.



At any rate, we would value suggestions.



Ted Bergstrom