Re: E-Journal admin costs

["Sally Morris" <sec-gen@alpsp.org>]

Three respondents to our recent benchmarking study identified additional
costs of between 5 and 15 percent for subscription administration (there
were also new costs for typesetting and editing)

Sally Morris, Secretary-General
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Phone:  01903 871686 Fax:  01903 871457 E-mail:  sec-gen@alpsp.org
ALPSP Website  http://www.alpsp.org

Learned Publishing is now online, free of charge, at
www.learned-publishing.org

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carol Hansen Montgomery" <montgoch@drexel.edu>
To: "Rollo Turner" <rollo.turner@onet.co.uk>
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 2002 10:44 PM
Subject: Re: E-Journal admin costs

> On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Rollo Turner wrote:
>
> > Counting the cost of e-journal admin
> >
> > Has anyone out there stopped to measure the costs of administering
> > e-journals? By this I mean the cost of subscription management and
> > access provision. It seems to me that as the process of acquiring
> > journals changes a great deal of simplicity is being lost with
> > consequent and often quite substantial impacts on cost.
>
> I have a grant from the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services to
> do just this.  I have been collecting staff time spent on "traditional"
> and electronic journal-related activites for about a year and a half.
> The analysis will be completed this Summer.  The project web site is at:
> http://www.library.drexel.edu/facts/imls/default.html.  You can find an
> overview in my article: "Measuring the Impact of an Electronic Journal
> Collection on Library Costs: A Framework and Preliminary Observations."
> D-Lib Magazine 6:10 (October 2000).
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/montgomery/10montgomery.html.
>
> Basically, I believe that the costs you mention are substantial.  We found
> about four years ago that using our agent actually complicted the process
> and consequently switched to a direct purchase model for the large
> packages.
>
> Carol Hansen Montgomery
> Dean of Libraries
> Drexel University