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Do the Bergstrom and McAfee Indexes reflect Value?

Jan Veltrop brings up a very fundamental question to the analysis of the Bergstrom and McAfee data, that is, are there more appropriate measurements for the abstract concept of "value"? I will argue that the choice of B&M's indexes are reliable and robust. While modifications may make them more accurate for particular comparisons, these indexes are simple, easy to construct, and provide immense heuristic value.

Cost Per Article

The CPA is a measurement of the production value that publishers provide consumers. While Jan argues (correctly) that page length and article type play a factor in how much it costs to produce an article, the number of articles published each year is a good indicator of how much unique content you are purchasing each year without having to undergo indepth article-by-article analysis.

Cost Per Citation

Citations are an accepted indicator of popularity and prestige. While they do not necessarily reflect articles that are read but not cited, they are transparent figures that are difficult to abuse (without being caught) -- which is not the case with download statistics. In addition, download statistics appear to be heavily influenced by a publisher's interface, which is not the case with citations (see http://people.cornell.edu/pages/pmd8/interface.pdf )

Relative Cost Index

The Bergstrom and McAfee data go beyond most price studies and compare journals to other journals within their field. This can provide a more balanced comparison than, say, the OUP/Loughborough University study that categorized journals only down to its major discipline (science, social science, humanities, etc. see http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/pages/publications/oup.html )

In sum, these three indexes are good indicators of "value". If anyone can come up with better indexes, please speak up, otherwise we can agree that they are the best that we have to work with.

-Phil Davis

At 05:39 PM 12/5/2005, you wrote:
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