Re: journal and publication costs, corrected figures

[David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

The argument is intended to be, that if this analysis applied to not
merely a few individual universities, but to all universities, then it
might add up, because the hundreds of thousands of articles produced
elsewhere would be paid for where they were produced.

As I say in another message I just posted, I do not think this data proves
this. I think it is suggestive only. I posted it because I was suprised at
the approximate equivalence to the $1500 proposed by Harnad et al., and I
wanted to see the reactions of others.

As you say, it does not take account of the nonscientific literature and
the nonjournal serials. It is not easy to disentangle the relative
proportions of money spent on them, but let's guess that 60 % of the
serials expenditure at Yale is scientific serials: then you're spending $6
million vs 3857 science articles or $1557/article. That's not the same as
$2169, but it's fairly close.

David Goodman

Ann Okerson wrote:

> David:  I'm not sure I fully understand the argument below.  I do
> understand that in a particular year, ISI reported that Yale authors
> published 4648 articles (as indexed in ISI's WoS presumably) and that in
> that same year Yale reported that it spent $10M on serials.  But how does
> that equate with each Yale article being worth over $2K to repurchase?
> That is, for that $10M, the library is buying journals, newspapers,
> annuals, databases, e-aggregations and services, tons of microform
> subscriptions, art images, and much much more -- *and* indeed we are
> buying tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of articles more than
> those that our faculty publish.  So, I need some help in following the
> thread below.
>
> Many thanks, Ann Okerson/Yale Library-Collections Development