Pricing and other means of charging for scholarly journals: a literature review and commentary

Abstract

There has been a clear upward trend over the past 50 years in traditional listed print subscription prices. The more recent trend towards electronic publishing has made possible new ways of charging for journals, such as differential pricing structures and bundling of journals which are purchased through license fees/charges (both of which enable libraries to buy significantly more journals, but at the same time make it more difficult to analyze prices). We are now also seeing a new emphasis on the ‘author‐side payment’ model. This article analyzes pricing and charging policies and trends, illustrating how these are affected by the complexities of the evolving journal system.

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“…The reasons for historic journal price increases have been varied and include (adapted from (King & Alvarado-Albertorio, 2008): growth in article output leading to increased numbers of articles per journal, which with a parallel increase in average article length led to larger journals; reduction in page and colour charges; the "new journal" effect (growth of scholarship leads to the burgeoning of new fields, which in turn leads to new journals; on average new journals will tend to be in niche areas with low circulations (at least initially) and will tend to be relatively inefficient economically, and hence will tend to have higher subscription prices); increased special requirements and features; conversion of back issues to electronic format; publishers increasing prices to compensate for falling subscription numbers and currency effects; and, of course, cost inflation (especially salary and paper costs), which has annualised at about 3% per annum for the last twenty or more years.…”

Considering Non-Open Access Publication Charges in the “Total Cost of Publication”

“…In certain fields, this was much higher-84% in engineering and 91% in the environmental sciences [11]. However, as authors switched to competing journals which did not levy page charges, the journals were forced to reduce or abolish their own charges-and, inter alia, raise their subscription fees, helping contribute to the often-discussed "serials crisis" [12,13].…”

Some economic aspects of the scholarly journal system

“…Subscription prices have been the object of much attention. King and Alvarado‐Albertorio (2008) review pricing and other means of charging for journals. They give trends of average prices from several sources dating back to 1960 for science journals.…”