RE: Elsevier Journal Pricing for 2007 and 2008

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

I agree with Eric that the course you suggest would be a good one for
Elsevier to follow, and I am very interested to see if it does. They more
than any other have the staff (both in numbers and quality) to make
rational analyses, and sufficiently objective management to follow them.

Indeed, in my preconference talk at Charleston and subsequently, I have
emphasized that the safest course for any publisher, commercial or non
commercial, is to keep prices constant (in absolute terms, not merely per
article) while encouraging the best possible OA to attract the greatest
readership and the best authors.

Per article increases may matter to the publishers. The library, however,
buys journals, and looks at the per journal increase.  Accepting more
papers and publishing a larger journal is one of the traditional
justifications of price increase, open to any publisher whose journal does
not already accept 100%. A librarian would instead want greater
selectivity, with fewer and shorter articles, and smaller journals.  I
also think that Eric's choice of years is correct, within a year or so.
But that's a guess--an equally plausible guess would be to say that
Elsevier will resume its usual 7 to 10% increases once currencies
stabilize.

My most recent guesses are to be found in "Open Access: what comes next
after 2004"  available on dlist, <http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/685/> , a
revision of a slightly earlier article in Learned Publishing.  In these,
and at Charleston, I have never specified a single date, but presented
multiple scenarios leading to a range of dates. The range of dates I have
consistently predicted for OA to reach 50% of published material is
between 2007 and 2011. Some of my scenarios predict the extinction of
conventional journasl--with the time untill 50% decline ranging between
2008 to 2020.  However, some of them predict their indefinite survival.

If i were required to specify a single date, the date I would guess at for
50 %OA in biomedicine is 2007; for other science fields, 2008.  This is
looking at things from a different angle than Eric, but the results are
compatible.  I do not know why he thinks they are not, and I regret if we
have misunderstood each other in the past.

The above guess is very much influenced by my hopes, as I think is Eric's.
I know what I want publishers (and libraries and authors) to do, but I do
not claim any knowledge of what they actually will do.  I no longer really
expect them to do what I think they should, and I accept the traditional
librarian's role of getting a working system back together, regardless of
how dysfunctional the other sectors become.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Eric Hellman
Sent: Wed 7/13/2005 5:28 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Elsevier Journal Pricing for 2007 and 2008
 
>One of our annual interactions now approaching is the 2006 subscription
>renewal. The average price increase for Elsevier journals in the coming
>year will be 5.5% (including volume increases), averaged across our 1,800
>journals. The vast majority of our titles will have an increase of 5.25%.
>Some titles may increase more, particularly where they have grown
>significantly in size, and for others the increase will be less. In the
>last year, the number of articles published in our current journals grew
>by over 4%.

So on a per article basis, it could be said that the price increase is
1.25%. From Elsevier announcements, the comparable number was 1.5% last
year and 2.5% the previous year.

I have been predicting that at some point not so far is the future, the
per article price will start to go down at both Elsevier and other major
publishers, reflecting their need to maximize the quantity
     Revenue = ( Price x Number of subscribers) 

For any demand curve, there must exist a price above which revenue drops
due to reduced sales. Eventually (which could be a while), the inexorable
price reductions, driven by economies of scale, will change most aspects
of the journal publishing business.

I'm going out on a limb here to predict that 2007 will be the year for
which Daviess Menefee will send us an email announcing a price increase
equal to the article growth, (0% increase per article)  and that 2008 will
be the year that the price per article published at Elsevier will start to
drop at Elsevier.

The last time I said this publicly (at Charleston in November), David
Goodman said the opposite would happen. Remember, you heard it here first.

Eric Hellman, President                            Openly Informatics, Inc.
eric@openly.com                                    2 Broad St., 2nd Floor
tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
http://www.openly.com/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything