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Not-for-profit journals found to be more cost-effective than commercial publications
Posted 9/23/1999
MADISON, Wis.--Ten years ago a science journal publisher decided to sue two nonprofit organizations for publicizing a UW-Madison professor's research. Results released this week from a study by the UW-Madison libraries confirm the professor's earlier findings.
The study by the UW-Madison General Library System began last year on the 10th anniversary of a landmark research report by the late UW-Madison Physics Professor Henry Barschall. The new research used 293 journals spanning physics, economics, and neuroscience.
"By the measures employed here," the researchers conclude, "commercially published journals in all three fields are signficantly less cost-effective than journals published by not-for-profit enterprises." In some cases the difference is a factor of 910-to-one.
The latest research was conducted by George Soete, a consultant with the Association of Research Libraries in Washington, D.C., with the help of Athena Salaba, a doctoral candidate in the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies.
According to General Library System Director Kenneth Frazier, "The UW-Madison libraries have been conducting cost studies of journals since the 1980s. They are intended to serve the academic community by expanding our knowledge about the cost-effectiveness of scholarly communication."
In 1988 Barschall studied the cost-impact ratios of 200 physics journals. He found that journals from commercial publishers generally had the lowest cost-impact. Specifically, Gordon & Breach journals scored consistently at the bottom of the scale.
In response Gordon & Breach brought suits in Swiss, German, French and U.S. courts against two nonprofit publishers of the results, the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. American, German, and Swiss courts ruled in favor of AIP and APS; an appeal is pending in France.
Barschall, a member of the University Library Committee at the time of his research and one of the world's preeminent nuclear physicists, created a scale of cost effectiveness by comparing the frequency with which articles were cited against the price of the library subscription per printed character. He died in February 1997 just months before a federal judge upheld the decision by the nonprofit organizations to publish his cost benefit analyses.
The research becomes an important aid for librarians engaged in purchase decisions. Journal prices have skyrocketed for more than a decade, taking ever larger chunks of library materials budgets. Last fall, the UW-Madison libraries worked with faculty to cancel more than 500 journals. That brings the total number of cancellations to nearly 7,000 in the past 12 years.
The campus libraries launched a Web site this week, "Measuring the Cost-Effectiveness of JournalsTen Years after Barschall," which includes the complete report at:
http://www.library.wisc.edu/projects/glsdo/cost.html
