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Re: Graphing the Bergstrom and McAfee Journal Pricing Data

Jan Veltrop wrote [snip]:

"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."

Phil responds:

Bergstrom and McAfee DO factor in the price differences between subject fields, and this is reflected in their Relative Cost Index

"Relative Cost Index: The relative cost index (RCI) is the Composite Price Index (CPI) divided by the median CPI of non-profit journals in the same subject category. Journals that have multiple subject listings are factored into the average CPI for each field it belongs to, and its RPI is its CPI divided by the average of the average CPIs for each field."

In addition, they DO create subject calculations, as reflected in their summary statistics: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~mcafee/Journal/Summary.pdf

While Jan's suggests breaking the journal field down into smaller analysis groups in order to control for subject, publisher, journal type, page length, citations, usage, et cetera, we are left with categories of one journal. In other words, we digress to argue that each journal is unique and therefore cannot be compared to any other journal. This is not very helpful. One only needs to review over twenty years of pricing research that analyzes journals -- in some cases, down to price per character -- to understand that the system is composed of massive pricing inequalities.

I'll respond to Jan's question of 'Value' in a separate post.

--Phil Davis

At 05:39 PM 12/5/2005, Jan Velterop wrote in full:
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