A couple of days ago, I came across a dataset on figshare (a data sharing site) detailing the article processing charges (APCs) paid by the University of Portsmouth to publishers in 2014. After I casually (lazily…;-) remarked on the existence of this dataset via Twitter, Owen Stephens/@ostephens referred me to a JISC project that is looking at APCs in more detail, with prototype data explorer here: All APC demonstrator [Github repository].
The project looks as if it is part of Jisc Collections’ look at the Total Cost of Ownership in the context of academic publishing, summing things like journal subscription fees along side “article processing charges” (which I’d hope include page charges?).
If you aren’t in academia, you may not realise that what used to be referred to as ‘vanity publishing’ (paying to get your first novel or poetry collection published) is part of the everyday practice of academic publishing. But it isn’t called that, obviously, because your work also has to be peer reviewed by other academics… So it’s different. It’s “quality publishing”.
Peer review is, in part, where academics take on the ownership of the quality aspects of academic publishing, so if the Total Cost of Ownership project is trying to be relevant to institutions and not just to JISC, I wonder if there should also be columns in the costing spreadsheet relating to the work time academics spend reviewing other peoples’ articles, editing journals, and so on. This is different to the presentational costs, obviously, because you can’t just write paper and submit it, you have to submit it in an appropriately formatted document and “camera ready” layout, which can also add a significant amount of time to preparing a paper for publication. So you do the copy editing and layout too. And so any total costing to an academic institution of the research publishing racket should probably include this time too. But that’s by the by.
The data that underpins the demonstrator application was sourced from a variety of universities and submitted in spreadsheet form. A useful description (again via @ostephens) of the data model can be found here: APC Aggregation: Data Model and Analytical Usage. Looking at it it just seems to cover APCs.
APC data relating to the project can be found on figshare. I haven’t poked around in the demonstrator code or watched its http traffic to see if the are API calls on to the aggregated data that provide another way in to it.
As well as page charges, there are charges associated with subscription fees to publishers. Publishers don’t like this information getting out on grounds of commercial sensitivity, and universities don’t like publishing it presumably on grounds of bringing themselves into disrepute (you spend how much?!), but there is some information out there. Data from a set of FOI requests about journal subscriptions (summarised here), for example. If you want to wade through some of the raw FOI responses yourself, have a look on WhatDoTheyKnow: FOI requests: “journal costs”.
Tim Gowers also wrote compellingly about his FOI escapades trying to trying down journal subscription costs data: Elsevier journals – some facts.
Other possible sources include a search engine that allows you to rank journals by price per article or citation (data and information sources).
This is all very well, but is it in anyway useful? I have no idea. One thing I imagined that might be quite amusing to explore was the extent to which journal subscriptions paid their way (or were “cost effective”). For example, looking at institutional logs, how often are (articles from) particular journals being accessed or downloaded either for teaching or research purposes? (Crudely: teaching – access comes from a student account; research – access from a research account.) On the other hand, for the research outputs of the institution, how many things are being published into a particular journal, and how many citations appear in those outputs to other publications.
If we take the line that use demonstrates value, and use is captured as downloads, publications into, or references into. (That’s very crude, but then I’m approaching this as a possible recreational data exercise, not a piece of formal research. And yes – I know, journals are often bundled up in subscription packages together, and just like Sky blends dross with desirable channels in its subscription deals, I suspect academic publishers do too… But then, we could start to check these based on whether particular journals in bundle are ever accessed, ever referenced, ever published into within a particular organisation, etc. Citation analysis can also help here – for example, if 5 journals all heavily cite each other, and one publisher publishes 3 of those, it could makes sense for them to bundle the journals two into one package and the third into another, so if you’re researching topics that are reported by heavily linked articles across those journals, you can essentially force people researching that topic into subscribing to both packages. Without having a look at citation network analyses and subscription bundles, I can’t check that outlandish claim of course;-)
Erm… that’s it…
PS see also Evaluating big deal journal bundles (via @kpfssport)
PPS for a view from the publishers’ side on the very real costs associated with publishing, as well as a view on how academia and business treat employment costs and “real” costs in rather contrasting ways, see Time is Money: Why Scholarly Communication Can’t Be Free.
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