Abstract
The academic libraries of higher education institutions (HEIs) pay significant amounts of money each year for access to academic journals. The amounts paid are often not transparent especially when it comes to knowing how much is paid to specific publishers. Therefore data on journal subscription expenditure were obtained for UK HEIs using a series of Freedom of Information requests. Data were obtained for 153 HEIs' expenditure with ten publishers over a five-year period. The majority of institutions have provided figures but some are still outstanding. The data will be of interest to those who wish to understand the economics of scholarly communication and see the scale of payments flowing within the system. Further research could replicate the data collection in other jurisdictions.
Highlights
Data on journal subscription expenditure were obtained for UK higher education institutions (HEIs) using a series of Freedom of Information requests
The amount of money paid by higher education institutions (HEIs) to access academic journals is of high interest to the academic community, and academic libraries in particular as they are responsible for the vast majority of journal purchases
This situation led to undertaking this research to make journal subscription expenditure openly available
Summary
Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. This version includes updates to the figures due to new data being included in the dataset, regarding three additional publishers for which new FOI requests were sent (Nature Publishing Group, Royal Society of Chemistry, and Institute of Physics Publishing). It includes a clarification of the way that VAT is recorded in the data, using a method which has changed since the previous version of this article
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