Information Research Weblog

I have been intriqued by the fact that, in a recent survey of readers of Information Research, few respodents were able to quote a price that they believed their institutions might have to pay, if the journal was a commercial product. I thought it might be useful, therefore, to check on the current institutional subscription rates for the journals most frequently cited by those readers when they were asked what other journals they read. The results are:

• Information Processing and Management - $1,495 ($249.16)
• Journal of Documentation - $709 ($118.16)
• Journal of Information Science - $432.96 ($72.16)
• Journal of Librarianship and Information Science - $457.00 ($109.68)
• Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology - $1,974 ($141.00)

Giving an average price for these five of $1,012.69

There is a difference, of course, in the number of issues a year and, correcting for this (price for an issue is in parentheses), we have an average price of $138.03 for an issue of a journal in this set. Of course, we could go further and calculate the price of a paper in these journals, but this seems overkill for the present purpose.

Interestingly, those readers of Information Research who were able to suggest a subscription price generally aimed low: there was a bi-modal distribution: nine responses suggested $50.00, i.e., less than half of the issue price of those above, and nine suggested $100.00 - still short of the cost of an issue.

The results suggest that readers, even when they are in the information professions, are generally unaware of the costs of journals - one imagines that the government's response to the Fourteenth Report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on open-access publishing is guided by similar ignorance.