The Periodicals Price Survey 2022 has been released by Library Journal and per usual for this annual survey, it offers a lot of data to interpret. The survey gives number of journals and their average costs by subject between 2020 – 2022 as categorized by the Library of Congress, Clarivate, and Ebsco’s Academic Search Ultimate, and the numbers vary by source. Overall, journal prices have increased by 5.5% between 2021 and 2022 for U.S. titles, 6.7% for non-U.S. titles. These price increases are placed in the context of growing general fund spending in states but declining higher education enrollments and library budgets. It paints a bleak landscape.
Open access publishing mandates have sought to disrupt the higher subscription price trend, and open access journals are projected to account for 50% of publications by 2024 and 50% of revenue by 2039. However, publishing costs have not levelled off. Large commercial publishers (Elsevier, SpringerNature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley) are dominating the open access market and expanding their services to researchers throughout the research life cycle (and employing surveillance technologies to monetize data). Society publishers and university presses are also experimenting with different revenue streams and open access publishing models to remain relevant and viable. Considerable uncertainty looms as library budgets continue to constrict.
The survey ends with an examination of journal value as determined by the intersection of price and citation metrics (Impact Factor and Eigenfactor). The data is presented by ranges of journal cost and by subject area. Higher priced journals do tend to receive more citations, but the increase in citations is far less than the price increase. “The average price ($8,539) for the most expensive journals was 24 times higher than the least expensive ($361) journals, while the Impact Factor slightly more than doubled.” The cost per citation varies by discipline, with chemistry journals providing a low relative cost and philosophy journals a high cost. This also reflects the journal citation tendencies of the different disciplines. Commercial journal publishers are profiting from the reputation economy. “Commercial publishers showed a cost per citation of 31¢ and an average price of $2,646, while university presses showed 12¢ and an average price of $718, and societal publishers showed 6¢ and an average price of $1,620.” It is university publishers and society publishers who provide far better value for the investments libraries and other funders make in them.
