Re: Graphing the Bergstrom and McAfee Journal Pricing Data

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Lisa Dittrich said:

>"So here's another, even more important one:  the whole concept of "for 
>profit" and "not for profit" is entirely off.  They say my journal is for 
>profit--it is not.  I pointed this out to them; they did not correct it. 
>According to B&M, any journal published by one of the big houses is "for 
>profit."  This simply isn't true.  Many not-for-profit journals use big 
>houses to handle what they are not equipped to do:  manage subscriptions, 
>advertising sales, promotions, putting the journal online, printing, 
>mailing, etc.  This does not change their non-profit, society based 
>status.  But B&M don't make this distinction.  So all of the data is 
>skewed."

Lisa, I don't know what your overall experience is with commercials and 
society publications.

For all practical purposes (tracking inflation, base price, and other 
measures) society journals in commercial publisher packages behave very 
much like wholly owned commercial journals. I've recently had the 
opportunity to learn about a publisher making an offer to a society to 
publish its journals and the pricing proposal was if memory serves, about 
4 times what the society was charging. SPARC has more information on this 
type of issue which has been played out repeatedly over the last 30 or so 
years and contributes to the overall reasons for "lumping" not for profits 
published by commercials in with the other commercial titles. If your not 
for profit journal managed to keep the base price different than what the 
commercial publisher is doing generally or is able to keep inflationary 
price increases below the norm, then great, but its not what libraries 
have generally experienced when not for profit journals are published by 
commercial operations. Elsevier, for example, publishes many society and 
association titles, but I'm not aware of any study demonstrating 
differential pricing behavior from their other titles. I did a small study 
in the 80's that we didn't publish that showed that the 
society/association titles in Elsevier behaved price-wise like the wholly 
owned titles.

I'm surprised given the last 20 years of the history of journal pricing 
studies that there are still society and association publishers that don't 
recognize that commercial publishers behave differently and have 
significantly different goals in terms of return even when publishing 
those societies' titles.

What's surprising in the data is that Elsevier and Blackwell's are 
trending differently than they have been, i.e. they are no longer the 
absolute leaders of the pack in pricing/value outliers. For example in 
price per citation they are middling now.

What I find interesting is that Sage and Taylor and Francis show up as 
almost outliers, and the why of that question is important. I don't think 
its because of the nature of what the publish, as Phil I think suggested, 
but more likely because of the heavy growth they've both undergone over 
the last few years. Perhaps large stable publishers are able to spread 
costs and even out over their published titles to show somewhat more 
orderly behavior (i.e. Blackwells and Elsevier) where growing publishers 
rapidly bringing new titles into their stable of publications show higher 
rates of behaviors that are worrisome. Makes me wonder what the growth 
rates for Elsevier looked like in the 70's and 80's. Was the aggressive 
and destructive pricing behavior the result of growing organizations that 
literally didn't know enough about their new titles?  Is rapid growth or 
publisher consolidation dangerous to the pricing structure libraries 
experience from publishers?

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223