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Re: Graphing the Bergstrom and McAfee Journal Pricing Data

The argument that Morna Conway is providing is clearly an obfuscation of the point of the Bergstrom and McAfee data. They were not attempting to justify the prices of journals, only to report and analyze them based on what they felt were appropriate value measures. I could start the most expensive journal in library science (I would have to beat out Emerald first), and justify my price that I only had ten subscribers, that I needed to take 25% profit to run my business, that I had no advertisement, that I had to travel around the world to attract authors, and that I had to pay reviewers a lot of money to read the poorly-written manuscripts. This is a justification of the price, which in no way is related to its value (in terms of dollars) to the subscriber community. It is the latter that Bergstrom and McAfee are getting at, not the further.

--Phil Davis

Journal Cost Effectiveness: http://www.journalprices.com/
Graphs and Tables: http://people.cornell.edu/pages/pmd8/prices.pdf


At 07:15 PM 12/1/2005, Morna Conway wrote:
[snip]

So the B&M analysis of journal pricing does not fully capture the
complexities of journal economics. The data needed are:

1.  Journal ownership (society or publisher)
2.  Society affiliation or not if owned by a publisher
3.  Circulation to members of society or not
4.  Other revenues available to a journal (e.g., advertising, commercial

     >reprints, author fees, supplements, subsidiary rights)

5.  Publishing arrangement (self-published, commercially published,
   university press published)
6.  Number of submissions
7.  Number of accepted articles
8.  Impact factor
9.  Access policy for online version
10. COUNTER data on downloads
11. Subscription pricing
12. Site license pricing

Collect and crunch those data, and someone might begin to get at what the
realities of journal pricing are all about!

Morna Conway, Ph.D.
Journal Publishing Consultant
mconway@infionline.net