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Re: Graphing the Bergstrom and McAfee Journal Pricing Data

Some shortcomings of the otherwise interesting data and graphs are that the data do not (not easily anyway) separate different journal types, such as review journals, research-journals, magazines with scientific content (such as e.g. Nature and Science), and mixtures of the above, and the graphs do not seem to take into account the very different portfolios of the various publishers in terms of disciplines covered. 'Value' is a relative concept. Average article length, for instance, and things like citation behaviour and habits with regard to downloads/usage from the publisher's site (take Physics as an example), or even download/usage habits per se (the value of publishing an article is not just in its usage, and sometimes almost not at all in its usage) vary considerably in different disciplines with its consequences on price per article and on just about every other variable in the dataset. For example, a portfolio consisting mainly of medical review journals and one consisting of mainly mathematics research journals will have extremely different characteristics, which are reflected in prices, citations, usage, et cetera, rendering direct comparisons between the two pretty useless.

My suggestion would be to make tables and graphs per discipline and taking into account journal types in order to have more material for meaningful comparisons.

Jan Velterop

On 5 Dec 2005, at 00:51, Phil Davis wrote:

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