Scholarly Peered Reviewed Journals on the Hewlett Packard Case
What began every bit a simple question revealed itself to be a simplistic one. This is because the allegedly simple question was presented to a group of thoughtful and experienced people, who apace demonstrated the complexity of the original question and made me doubt if it were answerable at all. That thoughtful grouping was, of grade, the participants in the liblicense post group, a list that is 1 of my media mainstays. I read it every solar day just after the New York Times, news about the Yankees, and the Google alerts set up on my own name.
The question was, "What would it toll if you wanted to purchase everything?" The "everything" I had in listen was all formally published academic journals. That means peer-reviewed material, but it excludes open access publications (since yous don't have to pay to read them). Also excluded for this exercise are books, databases, and other content types that more often than not sit down outside the bulk of discourse virtually scholarly communications. Y'all will see in a minute just how complicated the original question is, simply I had imagined what I idea was a fairly straightforward utilise example.
Here is that use instance. Allow's imagine a new company that seeks to create a business around information analytics of inquiry material. To practise this it needs to have access (including the rights for text- and data-mining) to all the research textile. One fashion to get access is to seek permission from all the publishers, but as there are thousands of journals publishers, this would be backbreaking and take forever. Another fashion, which may not be legitimate (I have no opinion well-nigh the copyright issues on this, so please, spare me in the comments), would be to cobble together access to a number of enquiry libraries; presumably when aggregated, these libraries, with some specialist outfits thrown in, would be able to provide admission to everything. But that also would exist hard to practice, not simply because of determining which libraries were necessary to put into the pool only also to have a legitimate registration with all these libraries–and to be able to download literally millions of articles from them without someone putting upwardly a Stop! sign.
Theoretically, y'all could work around these issues if yous had a big enough checkbook; yous could simply purchase (or lease, every bit many people reminded me) access and then text-mine to your and your robot'due south hearts' content.
And this is where it gets complicated. The first question is: When you lot say everything, would yous please submit a list of titles? I had causeless that the number would be effectually 25,000, a number that gets tossed around all the time, but whose authorization I should take challenged. After posing this question on liblicense, I got answers that ranged from xiii,000 to shut to l,000. I am making no attempt to reconcile this, just it is clear that we tin can't talk most ownership everything if we don't know what everything consists of.
Intriguingly, some respondents (I got feedback both directly from the liblicense list and privately) noted that no one would want to larn everything considering in that location is no establishment that has programs in every field and sub-field; and beyond that there is the thing of the quality of the publications, even if they all claim to be peer-reviewed. This opens up the question of who is the audience for a big drove of journals. If the audience is an individual or group of individuals, then surely there are some publications that are simply out of bounds either because their quality is poor, the subject area irrelevant, or they but are adding mere poundage to the already terrible burden of trying to continue up on one's field. But if the audience is a bot, doesn't everything change? Why finish at x,000 journals, even if they are the all-time and most relevant, when you can scoop up 25,000? 50,000? Isn't more amend–when the consumer is a machine? This leads me to believe that we are likely to see a rethinking of library collections with a machine audience in listen. Yes, this is unsettling, but every bit anyone who has tried to build a Web site knows, the audition for content on the Net is other machines, who spider and index ostensibly "human" expression; and Google is the Grand Poobah, the auditor with pride of place, to which all communications are at to the lowest degree initially intended
A second complicating question in determining how much everything would cost is that backfiles are important, too, so the cost of accessing those documents has to be added in. It's pretty clear that it would be hopeless to try to add all this upward, though across-the-board subscriptions to EBSCO, ProQuest, and JSTOR volition go y'all a good function of the way. Merely to these aggregators you lot would demand to add together the backfiles of such major publishers every bit Elsevier and the newly constituted Nature/Springer. Simply some backfiles are simply not available in a digital form at all and not every publisher has a programme in identify for that material. So to the already challenging question of the cost of electric current issues we take to add some unknown figure for the bachelor backfiles.
As 1 drills into this question, the number of variables grows:
- Recency. This is the question of electric current issues vs. backfiles.
- Form of account. I began by asking about the cost to a new commercial technology visitor, but pricing may vary by grade. Bookish libraries, for example, may pay a different amount from commercial showtime-ups.
- Size of account. Would a beginning-up pay the aforementioned amount every bit IBM or Hewlett Packard? Wouldn't a big user pay more? This applies to libraries as well: would a small library pay as much every bit a large one?
- Range of materials. Equally noted above, we don't have a consensus on the number of peer-reviewed journals.
- Extent of rights. Depending on what y'all want to do with the fabric, the cost may vary
So there is the interesting matter of the pricing of Big Deals. As some commentators take noted, pricing can be opaque–in role because of confidentiality clauses in contracts, but also because much pricing for Large Deals was based on historical pricing for print publications. An academic library that signed onto such a package years agone may be paying quite a fleck less than a library that entered the market today. There is, in other words, no single answer to the question.
Still, people tried to come up upward with reasonable estimates. The everyman was $13 meg, the highest $85 million. The number I found most persuasive, in big office because I know the individual personally who offered it up, was a range of $25-$30 million, to pay for electric current issues (no backfiles) of almost 30,000 journals. But in truth nosotros don't know. We could as easily opine on what the weather volition be like in Oct.
So I think my hypothetical tech company is going to have to get back to making a large number of business firm calls. To index everything is a big, big job, and one that is not easily solved with money.
This little experiment has fabricated me want to run some other i. When librarians say that they cannot afford to purchase (or lease!) all the materials they require, what is the absolute number they accept in heed? If the upkeep were exactly equal to what librarians want to acquire, what would that upkeep be? Now, this again is not a simple question. Libraries vary past institution, of course, and some of the other complications of the offset experiment (due east.g., different base of operations rates for Big Deals) would still use. Simply I wonder how much more than money libraries would like to spend. 10 percent more than? Fifty percent? V times their current budget? When nosotros talk about a shortfall in a library'southward budget, but how large is that shortfall?
No i is ever going to fund that full budget, of grade, and no one should. The number of publications available for purchase is non fixed: increment the budget and the number will ascent. And we all know that prices accept a manner of moving up, which a larger upkeep would guarantee. Nevertheless, I am even so surprised that for all the discussion of tight library budgets, we don't really know what a loose-plumbing fixtures ane would expect like.
Source: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/02/18/what-would-it-cost-to-buy-everything/
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