Abstract
Using price quotes and invoices for thousands of full-text databases and single-journal subscriptions, this study confirms that for a typical master’s university, the journals acquired through commercial publishers’ databases cost substantially less than those acquired through the databases of scholarly societies, universities, and other nonprofits. Moreover, the lower prices of commercial publishers’ journals cannot be readily attributed to publisher size (number of journals published) or to any of several other explanatory variables. There is a weak, direct association between publisher size and price among the for-profit journals but a stronger, inverse relationship between publisher size and price among the nonprofit journals. These findings, along with the results of previous research, suggest that resource providers may have incentives to keep prices low due to the collection development strategies adopted by many teaching-oriented colleges and universities. If the library’s goal is to hold a sufficient number of high-quality journals rather than to provide immediate access to every wanted journal, particular journals and databases may be regarded as substitutes even when each product provides unique content. Many U.S. bachelor’s and master’s institutions have goals different from those of the major research universities, and commercial publishers (along with some of the larger nonprofits) seem to recognize this when setting and negotiating prices.
Highlights
Faculty and librarians routinely point to commercial publishers as the reason for high journal prices
Journals acquired through full-text databases cost less than singlejournal subscriptions even when the total cost of each database is divided only among the wanted journals—those that faculty have identified as important to their teaching and research. (See Table 1 for several key concepts used in this study.)
The faculty were supplied with journal lists, citation information, and subjective journal ratings from Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) project (Australian Research Council, 2010; Clarivate Analytics, 2018; Graham, 2008; Lamp, 2010), and they were encouraged to add important journals not found on the JCR and ERA lists
Summary
Faculty and librarians routinely point to commercial publishers as the reason for high journal prices. Both analyses evaluate not just single-journal subscriptions, but the acquisition opportunities available through full-text databases and other bundled online resources Both are based on the prices paid by academic libraries. ( it is possible that these activities will reduce production costs in the long term but increase them in the short term—e.g., in the years immediately after a merger.) larger publisher may be better able to maintain the infrastructure needed to evaluate their pricing and marketing strategies on a continuous basis, to negotiate complex or flexible arrangements with particular customers, and to practice price discrimination (Table 1) in ways that benefit both the resource provider and the subscribing institution. Publisher size had no impact on cost in a separate regression that included just the nonprofit publishers (Ortelbach et al, 2008)
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