The ever changing financial focus on serials pricing

Citation

Fitzsimons, E. (2002), "The ever changing financial focus on serials pricing", The Bottom Line, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2002.17015cab.002

The ever changing financial focus on serials pricing

The ever changing financial focus on serials pricing

Keywords: Pricing policy, Pricing strategy, Journal publishing, Publishing

Both Library Journal (van Orsdel and Born, 2002) and American Libraries (Albee and Dingley, 2002) published their serial price surveys in April. Although they use different sets of titles, they both have similar results. Both found less than double digit in 2002, and increases at rates lower than the last several years. There are also some interesting trends in electronic subscriptions that will make pricing in the near future less predictable.

Library Journal's by van Orsdel and Born gave their "Periodicals price survey 2002" the subtitle "Doing the digital flip". The "digital flip" refers to a change in the status of e-journals, no longer simply adjuncts to paper publications, but the format of preference for many librarians. As the authors point out, the first e-journals appeared about ten years ago. At that time, it was assumed that paper would continue to be the primary format, since it provided archival certainty. The e-journal was provided as an extra, often free with a subscription to the print journal. Since then, publishers have been experimenting with various pricing structures, adjusting their models as they have become more experienced with selling online journals, and as the demand from libraries has increased. However, the print-online package remained the norm. For example, in 2000, 75 percent of the publishers provided online access free with a print subscription.

Apparently, last year things changed. Because users preferred the online editions, several consortia wanted to negotiate the print and the electronic versions separately, with the online version the primary subscription. In other words, they were interested in flip pricing: online-plus-print rather than the standard print-plus-online. Often when such packages are negotiated they include DDP options – purchase of the print edition at deeply discounted prices. In these cases, with a subscription to the online journal, the print edition may be available for 10 percent to 40 percent of the list price. Although this pricing structure has been used by some publishers, most have continued to focus on providing the online edition as an extra. Van Orsdel and Born see this as an important trend in serials marketing. In any case, they stress that the variety of pricing models further complicates budgeting issues.

Furthermore, the Association of Subscription Agents is working to get publishers to announce their structure earlier in the year, so that customers have forewarning and can adjust their subscriptions accordingly. It also may affect the use of vendors, since some publishers either require or offer incentives for the e-journal order to be placed directly through them. Also, vendors make much less on electronic subscriptions. Orsdel and Born see some other unexpected trends. For example, they predict that research libraries with significant science, technology, and medical (STM) collections are likely to experience lower overall percentage increases than will general collections. They say their estimate of 10 percent increases in 2003 for general collections is conservative. Although such scientific research collections purchase the more costly titles, the STM-journal prices – along with prices for non-US journals – are not increasing at the same rates as they did at one time. Van Orsdel and Born think that this may be evidence of publishers' attempts to slow the rate of cancellations. In fact, in the social sciences there are fewer cancellations and, at the same time, the rate increases for social science titles over the last few years have exceeded those for STM titles. An unknown is the effect on 2003 prices of Elsevier's acquisition last summer of Harcourt General, Inc., which put Academic Press, Mosby, W.B. Saunders, and Churchill Livingstone under Elsevier. Such acquisitions are usually accompanied by hefty price increases.

The fact that STM publishers may be responding to cancellations highlights the power that the consumer can have. Although libraries have been making annual cancellation choices to cope with the discrepancies between the rate of price increases and the rate of budget increases, there are also moves to improve the quality of serials acquisitions decisions as well as to stem the price increases.

For example, the University of Kansas (KU) libraries created a public document addressing the issues of scholarly communication and periodicals. This document has been posted on the Web and is available not only to librarians, but also to students, faculty, and other library patrons who want an overview of the serials acquisitions and cancellations, lists of cancelled periodicals, and an explanation of the process. Except for some sections that can only be accessed from KU computers, it is also available to the general public at http://www2.lib.ukans.edu/schlacomm/sercan01/Sertskfc.htm. Part one of the document is "The University of Kansas Libraries Serials Manifesto", which outlines the pricing crisis and offers hyperlinks to other sites that discuss various aspects of periodical subscriptions and consumer protest in greater detail. The second part of the document is "Considerations for journal acquisition and retention: cost, quality, and related factors", which in addition to an in-depth discussion of subscription-cost issues provides a list of questions that can serve as guidelines when making serial subscription decisions. In addition to expected criteria, such as what weight should be given to the price history of a title, there are other concerns that address scholarly publishing in general, such as conditions under which the library should give preference to publications from scholarly societies or university presses; situations that warrant retaining a for-profit title rather than switching to a journal published under the sponsorship of an organization such as SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition); and expectations that publishers will support making scholarly articles available for teaching. The final section is a serial acquisition and retention checklist with references to reports that are available to KU subject specialists.

A final feature of the site is the hyperlinks to organizations that are examining the pricing of scholarly information. Among the organizations that have links from the site are SPARC (www.arl.org/sparc), which describes itself as "an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations built as a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system"; Create Change (www.createchange.org), which includes among its strategies shifting control of scholarly publications away from commercial publishers and creating electronic alternatives to commercial publications; and BioOne (www.bioone.org), which publishes full texts from bioscience research journals on the Web, mostly titles from non-commercial publishers, with a view not only toward helping libraries contain costs, but also providing them with a means for directly offering support to research.

Although these sites for the most part were posted in 2000 and 2001, they are still timely and provide guidelines for collection development decisions as well as avenues for taking action that will promote accessible, affordable scholarly publications.

Eileen FitzsimonsFitzsimons Editorial Services