RE: Homer Simpson at the NIH

["Jan Szczepanski" <Jan.Szczepanski@ub.gu.se>]

What Elsevier is saying is that the cost per download is falling
and that is right but that doesn't mean that every article
downloaded is cheap.

The Bradford law (80/20) is true in the case of the Elsevier Big
Deal and that makes some articles extremly costly and some
extremly cheap.

This is what some of the most important libraries have discovered
and what have made them to reject Big Deals.

My favorite example is the medical library in M=FCnster, Germany
that has inspired a lot of German libraries, that buys the most
used e-journals from Elsevier and for the rest gives free copies
to their customers. The medical library in M=FCnster, the most
popular medical library in Germany, has about 400 Elsevier
e-journals. Because the price per article in these journals are
lower than 5 euro.

Sorry for my bad English Mr Esposito!

Jan

****

> Both Ian Russell and Rick Anderson have picked-up on the issue
> of value-for-money and cost-per-article.  Yes,
> cost-per-download has certainly fallen over the past few years.
> But do we have any evidence that open access will increase the
> total system costs, as Joe is suggesting?
>
> I'm not going to elevate this to the level of evidence that we
> can generalise from, but let me share a factoid.  Elsevier in
> recent literature have suggested that the average
> cost-per-download for the articles they publish is about 2
> Euros (certainly a vast improvement on the 12 Euros per
> download they claim they charged at the start of the big
> deals).  In a recent presentation in Washington Byran Vickery
> of BioMedCentral said that the analogous figure for BMC
> articles is about 0.35 Euros. (Obviously, it is subscription
> price divided by downloads for Elsevier and article processing
> charge divided by downloads for BMC.)
>
> Those figures begin to suggest that in this case open access is
> less expensive to the community than big deal subscription
> access.
>
> David C Prosser PhD
> Director
> SPARC Europe
> E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk
> http://www.sparceurope.org
>
> -----Original Message-----
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Ian Russell
> Sent: 03 August 2007 18:00
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: RE: Homer Simpson at the NIH
>
> David Prosser wrote:
>
>> JE: 'The overall costs of scholarly communications will rise.'
>>
>> Maybe, but don't the overall costs of scholarly communication
>> rise anyway each year - that's certainly the feeling most
>> librarians have! Alternatively, and less flippantly, it's
>> entirely possible that if we can create a new, functioning
>> market then at least we may get better value for money.
>
> David,
>
> In the current environment increases in overall costs in
> journal publishing are primarily driven by the increase in the
> number of articles being produced and published.  Love them or
> hate them, 'big deals' and consortia purchasing have actually
> been driving the average cost per journal down and (at least
> for the publishers that I have worked for) price per page and
> price per article has been falling for many years; this in the
> context of often large expenditure on IT.
>
> My personal opinion is that the increase in international
> standard research articles from China and India in the next
> 5-10 years will have a greater impact on the economics of
> journal publishing than OA, but that's another topic.
>
> I think assessing the 'value for money' of alternative business
> models is sensible; for example I still can't see the 'value'
> in building an expensive and duplicative system of online
> repositories when academics can, by-and-large, get the material
> they want more or less immediately and many publishers are
> operating their own online journals with free access after a
> reasonable embargo period anyway...
>
> There are less expensive and faster ways of dealing with the
> issue of access to the literature by the public too (though my
> feeling is that demand would be exceptionally low).  I am
> surprised that free access from public libraries has not been
> explored more fully for example...
>
> Ian Russell
> ALPSP
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