FW: Open access and journal costs

["Sloan, Bernie" <bernies@uillinois.edu>]

Forwarded with Tom Wilson's permission...

Bernie Sloan

-----Original Message-----
From: Open Lib/Info Sci Education Forum [mailto:JESSE@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU]
On Behalf Of Prof. Tom Wilson
Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 2:02 PM
To: JESSE@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: Open access and journal costs

I have been intriqued by the fact that, in a recent survey of readers of
Information Research, few respodents were able to quote a price that they
believed their institutions might have to pay, if the journal was a
commercial product. I thought it might be useful, therefore, to check on
the current institutional subscription rates for the journals most
frequently cited by those readers when they were asked what other journals
they read. The results are:

        * Information Processing and Management - $1,495 ($249.16)
        * Journal of Documentation - $709 ($118.16)
        * Journal of Information Science - $432.96 ($72.16)
        * Journal of Librarianship and Information Science - $457.00
	($109.68)
        * Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
	Technology - $1,974 ($141.00)

    Giving an average price for these five of $1,012.69

There is a difference, of course, in the number of issues a year and,
correcting for this (price for an issue is in parentheses), we have an
average price of $138.03 for an issue of a journal in this set. Of course,
we could go further and calculate the price of a paper in these journals,
but this seems overkill for the present purpose.

Interestingly, those readers of Information Research who were able to
suggest a subscription price generally aimed low: there was a bi-modal
distribution: nine responses suggested $50.00, i.e., less than half of the
issue price of those above, and nine suggested $100.00 - still short of
the cost of an issue.

The results suggest that readers, even when they are in the information
professions, are generally unaware of the costs of journals - one imagines
that the government's response to the Fourteenth Report of the House of
Commons Science and Technology Committee on open-access publishing is
guided by similar ignorance.

___________________________________________________
Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD
Publisher/Editor in Chief
Information Research
InformationR.net
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TN,  UK
e-mail: t.d.wilson@shef.ac.uk
Web site: http://InformationR.net/
___________________________________________________