
Scientific journal subscription costs in Finland 2010-2015: preliminary analysis - transitus
http://ropengov.github.io/r/2016/06/10/FOI/
======
transitus
Data was released as a response to FOI request. Finland might be the first
country where annual subscription fees for all individual publishers and all
major research institutions have been made available, spanning the years
2010-2015 (link to the data can be found through the first link and the last
link of the following pages).

Release notes: [http://openscience.fi/-/transparency-and-openness-to-
scienti...](http://openscience.fi/-/transparency-and-openness-to-scientific-
publishing-the-finnish-research-organisations-pay-millions-of-euros-annually-
to-the-large-publishers)

And data:
[https://avointiede.fi/web/openscience/publisher_costs](https://avointiede.fi/web/openscience/publisher_costs)

For example, publisher Taylor & Francis has costs have increased more than 20%
per year in 2014 and 2015.

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dougmccune
This is SUPER back of the napkin-y, so I hope I haven't done some crazy wrong
math somewhere or used inaccurate stats, but I was trying to get a sense of
context for how journals fit into overall university funding (which in Finland
is almost all public funding).

All numbers are for 2011

Finland GDP: $273.7B USD (1)

public expenditure on education: 6.8% (2)

calculated expenditure on education: $18.6B USD

total cost for academic journals: $21.5M USD ($19M EUR) (3)

journal cost as % of yearly university funding: 0.12%

enrolled university students: 168,983 (4)

yearly cost per student for academic journals: $112 USD

(1)
[https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...](https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:FIN&hl=en&dl=en)
(2) [http://www.oecd.org/edu/Education-at-a-
Glance-2014.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/edu/Education-at-a-Glance-2014.pdf) (3)
[http://openscience.fi/publishercosts](http://openscience.fi/publishercosts)
(4)
[http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__kou__y...](http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__kou__yop/010_yop_tau_101.px/table/tableViewLayout1/?rxid=052c6f7e-9bbd-4fc6-9e28-1d504813c4e2)

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baldfat
Former Academic System's Librarian:

The BIGGEST Scam running over a decade now. The digital subscriptions are for
back ordered journals. These journals sat in boxes behind the current issue
and you had to look up an index to find what you needed.

So instead of making 100% of their money on current issues they have now made
it where they make 90% of their money on old content that was making them
nothing but they get to charge 10 times more and obscure journals get a larger
paid audience.

Research issues are mostly paid with tax payer money or non-profits and the
profits go to delivery companies. This reminds me of Apple Apps and Google
Play's 30% profits.

LOCKED OUT are the paying public. I no longer am in academic work anymore
(Gladly) and I no longer can look up research. Really sucked when my son had
cancer.

------
__mbm__
This confirms Elsevier's status as the most avaricious publisher, accounting
for more than one-third of Finland's overall subscription costs. Wiley comes
in a distance second at 10%. Many academics, particularly in mathematics, have
come to boycott Elsevier's journals due to it's extraordinarily high prices
and "all-or-nothing" subscription model. However, due to NDAs that Elsevier
forces libraries to sign, confirmed numbers were previously very rare.

Some more information on the boycott appears in [1] and at Tim Gower's blog
[2].

[1] [http://thecostofknowledge.com/](http://thecostofknowledge.com/) [2]
[https://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-
so...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/)

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dougmccune
If you're going to look at this and figure out which companies get what share
of the money, one thing to note is that there are some large subscription
agents in here. Ebsco is the third largest receiver of funds, but they're just
a subscription agent that processes subscriptions for the publishers, so that
money really just represents various journals from other publishers. I think
there are others within the top 20 list there too, but Ebsco is the most
obvious. That probably doesn't change the overall distribution among the top
publishers (which in this case is Elsevier, Wiley, Springer as the top 3), but
it does obscure some of the data.

~~~
dougmccune
It's also worth pointing out another aspect of subscription agents. The second
largest subscription agent, SWETS, went bankrupt in 2014. If you look at the
graph for the top publishers you'll see some big changes in 2014. Ebsco
(another subscription agent) revenue starts dropping and Taylor and Francis
revenue shoots up dramatically. I don't know this for sure, but I'd bet that
those trends are 100% related to the SWETS bankruptcy. Publishers started
trying to more direct deals without subscription agents. For some reason the
data only has SWETS numbers for 2010, which doesn't seem right, I'd expect
numbers until 2014. But for the big changes in 2014 (like the T&F jump) I'd
guess that it's just about shifting from using agents to dealing with
publishers directly.

So all this to say that there are a lot of intricacies in this data, and
without the context a lot of it is misleading. Taylor and Francis didn't
increased their prices by 20x in 2014.

Another example is where the post cites differences among publishers when
looking at "cost per citation" (which alone is a dubious metric). This is
going to be entirely dependent on field of study. Certain fields, like bio and
physics have massively higher citation rates per paper than fields like
humanities and social sciences. Publishers (like SAGE) who focus on social
sciences are going to have vastly fewer citations per article than publishers
with an STM focus. But the value of a journal (either defined as the actual
cost or in more theoretical ways) isn't simply directly tied to citation
counts. I'd argue that's a good thing, but I suppose you could debate it. But
I raise the issue only to point out that "revenue per citation" types of
metrics are almost entirely related to the fields of research and not
publishers over or under charging for the same content relative to each other.

------
mtrn
There was a spreadsheet floating around on r/libraries from 2007 about the
subscription costs in Tennessee:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Libraries/comments/4jodic/found_an_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Libraries/comments/4jodic/found_an_old_price_list_of_scholary_databases/)

