Illustration of serial cost history
By comparison, the consumer price index increased by 84% over the same period. As the graph indicates, serial expenditures have increased at a steep and steady rate, far more than the other measures illustrated, even though serial unit costs have decreased in recent years. Understanding this seeming inconsistency necessitates an understanding of both “unit cost” and “bundling”.
Unit cost and bundling
However, around 2000, some publishers started to offer electronic “bundles” of their journals. Within these bundles are some titles that a given library historically subscribed to, plus other titles in which that library may or may not have significant interest. Even though prices for bundles routinely increase by a minimum of 5% per year, many libraries still purchase them, both for the increased access to content the bundles provide and because the prices of individual serial titles increase at a higher annual rate (~8% per year) than do the bundles. Because those bundles offer more serial titles for a not concomitantly large increase in price, serial unit costs dropped. But that drop occurred only because libraries have chosen what they consider to be the better of the two purchase choices available to them.
While bundling provides a library with access to more serial titles (although in some cases titles the library otherwise would not have subscribed to), the amount libraries pay annually for bundles to get the serial titles they are most interested in continues to climb at a substantial rate (see the serials expenditures line on the graph). By contrast, because publishers only now are experimenting with bundling of monographs, there is no corresponding drop in monograph unit costs over the last few years.
Bundling has resulted in an increase in the number of serial titles available to many libraries since roughly the year 2000. But in many cases this increased access in no way offsets many prior years of serial cancellations brought on by high annual serial price increases and small or flat library materials budget increases. The large increase in serial expenditures came as a result of many libraries putting an increasingly large percentage of their materials budgets into paying for serials, at the expense of monograph and other purchases. The ARL statistics seem to bear this out. Again, from a baseline of 1986, monograph purchases in each subsequent year have generally been substantially below that 1986 level, with only two years showing 1% increases.
Large increases in journal and other serial prices over the last 20+ years resulted in significant rebellion by librarians and others against the pricing practices of many publishers. That push-back has taken many forms, including the flourishing of the open access movement as an alternative to traditional subscription-based publishing, concerted efforts by individual libraries and library consortia to pressure publishers to moderate the rates of increase in their journal subscription costs, and the involvement and pressure of faculty, funding agencies and government bodies in support of alternatives to traditional publishing models.
Other Measures
The results of those computations show that, in general, the cost per article and cost per citation are substantially lower for not-for-profit journals than their for-profit counterparts. Differences in this value across titles vary by as much as three orders of magnitude.
