Scientific journal subscription costs in Finland 2010-2015: preliminary analysis

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...

And data: 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.

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.

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.

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_&... (2) http://www.oecd.org/edu/Education-at-a-Glance-2014.pdf (3) http://openscience.fi/publishercosts (4) http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__kou__y...