Journal prices continue to rise, while resources remain flat, challenging all players to eke out the most value for students and scholars

Fracking is the process of injecting liquids or solids into rock under high pressure, releasing oil and gas deposits from fields that may have been previously thought to be of marginal quality or depleted to the point that it wouldn’t be cost effective to develop using traditional methods alone. While a common practice to improve oil field productivity, consequences ranging from water contamination to earthquakes have been attributed to the practice.

What does fracking have to do with scholarly publishing and journal pricing? While the library financial landscape has improved since the depth of the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, it still cannot be considered robust. As articles such as this one chronicle annual serials price increases, libraries, publishers, and vendors search for innovative ways to fulfill information needs within the finite, predefined budget environment. New business and access models ranging from the initial e-journal big deal packages, article pay per view, open access, mega-journals, and publisher e-journal database pricing have evolved in response to the environment; libraries, publishers, and vendors have merged, consolidated, or disappeared along the way. Just as fracking keeps the oil and gas flowing, these strategies enable the current scholarly publishing ecosystem to extract the necessary resources—intellectual and financial—to survive.

Stagnant economy

The U.S. economy continues to expand, and the public sector is experiencing positive growth, but that growth is not yet sufficient to return to prerecession (2008) levels when adjusted for inflation. According to reports from the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), overall state spending has increased compared with 2008, rising from $687 billion to an expenditure of $759 billion in 2015. However, when inflation is calculated based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the 2015 expenditures fall 4% short of the $789 billion that would be needed just to keep up. State general fund spending is expected to top $790 billion in 2016, but, again, that will be just shy of what would be needed to match 2008 levels. According to the NASBO report, “State budgets continue to grow at a moderate pace after several years of slow recovery in the national economy following the Great Recession.... This growth rate falls below the historical average, though the current inflation rate remains low as well.”

Funding for K-12 education has seen some relief as a total of 41 states increased allotments.

Slow growth in public funding is reflected in budgets for higher education and libraries. A 2015 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that 47 states still spend less per student in higher education than was spent in 2007–08. In 2016, Inside Higher Ed reported this mixed economic message. Appropriations increased 4.1% for 2016, but this figure does not include Illinois and Pennsylvania, which, when reported, could pull down the percentage. Some 15 states are still appropriating less than they were five years ago.

A survey conducted by the Publishers Communication Group in 2015 indicated that growth in library funding was expected to be about 1.2% in 2015, not even enough to cover basic inflation let alone increases common to library materials. The strength of the dollar relative to other world currencies will add additional pressure for libraries, especially those outside of the United States, greatly magnifying the impact of annual price increases and slow-growth budgets.

Maximizing value

All players in the scholarly communications ecosystem, including publishers, libraries, and vendors, are going to have to develop creative ways to “frack” the system to squeeze added value out of a stagnant resource base. Slow budget growth and price inflation will force libraries to manage actively the resources they make available to their users in a number of ways. Decisions will be made using the best data available. Content needed by scholars will be provided by the most cost-effective means. Some libraries will be dropping big deals. Delivery of content will be a focus. Content does not need to be owned/collected to be useful. Budgets will be aligned to support current information needs within the constraints of available funds. It will be necessary to work with the broader community to build cooperative approaches to acquiring and preserving the scholarly record ­comprehensively.

Price, value, and expenditure

Price, value, and expenditure are all related, but each is measured in different ways. The value of content is an important factor to consider when making purchasing decisions, but the price on the invoice is what impacts the budget, and there needs to be reliable information on changes in price to assist with budget planning.

This price survey, with the exception of Table 3, uses a print-preferred pricing model based on the standard retail price for the titles in the selected indexes. Print pricing is used for consistency because not all publishers make their online-only pricing available, or they don’t have a standard online-only retail price. However the index does contain some pricing for print + online and online (29% of the titles) but only if those were the only rates offered.

While many of the charts that accompany this article use the print pricing of journals, as noted in current and past price projections features, it’s important to keep in mind that such a large portion of library budgets is now dedicated to the purchase of e-journal packages. Accordingly, we have measured the 2015 price increases of more than 5,000 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO. Our analysis indicates an average e-journal package price increase of 5.8% to 6.3%, down slightly from last year’s average of 6.6%.

Expanding the data set

Traditionally, this survey has used the titles indexed in the ISI Arts and Humanities Index, Science Citation Abstracts, and Social Science Citation Index. We have presented the data from these indexes individually as well as in merged format, sorted by discipline and country of origin.

Historically, we have also analyzed the pricing of the full-text titles in ­EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier data-­base to represent the titles most commonly held in general academic and public library collections. Starting with this survey, we will be using the titles indexed by Academic Search Complete, which is now the most commonly found in its respective markets. This shift also makes the data more consistent with the ISI indexes as both sets of data are based on indexed titles, not on index titles in one set of data and full-text titles in another. The result of these changes is that we are now examining 7,124 priced titles indexed in Academic Search Complete. Last year the data set was 3,151 titles.

This year we were also able to expand the study to include approximately 15,000 titles indexed by ­SCOPUS. Subsequently, this year’s feature examines pricing for 18,473 unique titles, our largest sample to date. Increasing the sample makes the results more reliable, and like nearly all other data sources employed for this article, the increase in serial prices documented in the SCOPUS Table is again 6% for 2016.

2016 by the numbers

Tables 1–3 accompanying this article analyze average subscription prices by LC subject area and country of origin.

TABLE 1: Average prices for science, technology, and medical (STM) serials remain the highest, compared with prices for serials in other subject areas. Chemistry has historically seen the highest average serial prices and that has not changed. This year’s data reports the average price for chemistry journals is $5,105 annually. There were only slight shifts in relative rankings for subject areas based on the overall average prices for serials. Food science and astronomy swapped places as well as technology and zoology. As noted in the analysis of the charts, content from the five major publishers—Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE—continues to represent more than half (52%) of the titles in the merged ISI indexes.

TABLE 1: AVERAGE 2016 PRICE FOR SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES

TABLE 2: There was little change in the relative order for the average price per title sorted by country of origin. Since so many serials are now priced in U.S. dollars, the exchange rate issues experienced by foreign libraries are not seen in this table. While the average price per title increased from previous years, titles from Russia and Ireland continue to have the highest cost per title for all foreign titles included in the merged ISI indexes. Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, Singapore, Germany, Switzerland, England, and New Zealand round out the top ten countries with the highest cost per title in 2016.

TABLE 2: AVERAGE 2016 PRICE PER TITLE BY COUNTRY

TABLE 3: Table 3 examines the titles in the combined ISI Arts and Humanities, Science Citation, and Social Sciences Citation indexes, which offer published rates for online formats. This table now has 61% of the titles in the full ISI-based tables. As in past years, the data reflects online only, print plus free online, and the first tier of any tiered pricing, with the common element being pricing for the online format. As in Table 1, STM titles are the most expensive, with chemistry titles having the highest average cost. The 2016 average cost for this set of titles is $1,486. While the 5% increase over last’s year’s average price of $1,413 may seem modest, it is important to bear in mind that the individual titles in the data set and associated pricing models reflected by Table 3 change each year so price increases can be due to changes in the data as well as actual price changes. What does remain consistent is the annual increase falling in the 5% to 6% range and the relative high cost of titles by subject areas, with science and technology areas at the top of the chart. The average costs are lower in Table 3 than in the ISI-based tables that include print. This is owing to some large, high-price publishers not having retail prices for online versions of their journals.

TABLE 3: AVERAGE 2016 PRICE FOR ONLINE JOURNALS IN THE ISI INDEXES*

The 2017 forecast

The 2017 serials marketplace will continue to see steady increases in prices, with no indicators to the contrary. Those involved with the scholarly communications marketplace are all fracking the system, trying to release more value from a limited resource base. Drivers continue to include increased research outputs, budget compression, price inflation, the need to fund new research and education directions, open access, government mandates, new assessment and evaluation tools, and changing patterns of the distribution of information offered by research platforms and social networks. All practitioners in the information marketplace—libraries, publishers, and vendors—will continue to use whatever means they can to extract value from a stagnant set of resources. Publisher and vendor consolidation will continue, and libraries will actively manage their portfolios to get the biggest return for their dollars. The 6% average price increase seen in 2016 is expected to remain fairly constant for 2017, with perhaps a very slight downward trend hovering in the 5.5% to 6.5% range. Six percent seems to be a level of inflation that is neither too much for libraries to bear nor too little for publishers to accept.

TABLE 6: COST HISTORY FOR TITLES IN MASTERFILE COMPLETE

TABLE 7: 2017 COST PROJECTIONS FOR TITLES IN ACADEMIC SEARCH COMPLETE

TABLE 8a: TITLES INDEXED IN SCOPUS COST HISTORY BY LC SUBJECT

TABLE 8b: COST HISTORY FOR TITLES IN ACADEMIC SEARCH COMPLETE

TABLE 9: ISI INDEXES COST HISTORY BY LC SUBJECT

TABLE 10: 2017 COST PROJECTIONS BY BROAD SUBJECT

Stephen Bosch is Materials Budget, Procurement, and Licensing Librarian, University of Arizona Library, Tucson. Kittie Henderson is the Vice President for Academic, Law, and Public Library Markets, EBSCO Information Services, Birmingham, AL