Over at The Scholarly Kitchen, Philip Davis takes the ARL to task for comparing their serials expenditures with the Consumer Price Index:
By adopting the CPI as a general frame of reference, almost any industry that requires huge professional worker input will look like it is spiraling out of control. Perhaps this is the reason the ARL uses the Consumer Price Index as a reference for journal prices when it could have used the Higher Education Price Index, the Producer Price Index, or an index which more closely resembles professional knowledge production. ...
Since I've just played around with updating the famous graph to which Davis takes exception, I thought I'd better take a closer look at the alternative indices he suggests. ...
There isn't a lot of difference between the HEPI and the CPI, and the all commodities PPI index shows even less increase. Davis suggests that salaries, professional worker input, are at least part of the reason why the CPI is a poor choice for comparison with serials costs, but (to the extent that the HEPI is a better "professional worker weighted" measure) the data do not bear him out. ...
Remember, too, that this is still only part of the story: "serials" includes a great many publications whose costs have not increased at the same rate as the scholarly literature. The Abridged Index Medicus data I got from EBSCO only cover 1990 onwards, so I reworked the comparison to include the AIM data ...
I used the AIM data because comparison with a much larger data set, broken down by individual discipline, showed that the AIM data gave what looks like a reasonable "middle value" -- and as you can see, scholarly journal price increases outstrip all others, including total serials, by a considerable margin. ...
If you want the data I used, the spreadsheet is here.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/02/2009 05:05:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
