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0098-7913/03$–see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.PII: S0098-7913(03)00041-8

Value for Money in Electronic Journals: A Survey of the Early Evidence and Some Preliminary Conclusions

John Cox

The author examines the proposition that electronic journals provide enhanced valuefor their costs when compared to print subscriptions. At the journal, article, and uselevels, the author reviews the pricing policies of two different journal publishers, onecommercial and one nonprofit. He confirms and extends these findings using recentlypublished research. Whereas much research remains to be undertaken on the basis ofstandards, and definitions must be agreed on, the existing, albeit imperfect, evidenceindicates that both libraries and their readers benefit significantly from electronicjournals in the areas of cost per use and convenience of delivery of scholarly and re-search literature. This proposition serves as a clarion call for more detailed researchbased on agreed-upon on standards. Serials Review 2003; 29:83–88.

© 2003 Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Measuring use and assessing what constitutes “value formoney” in scholarly journal publishing has always beendifficult. In the print environment, usage has been mea-sured by re-shelving statistics and by analyses of cost perarticle or cost per published page. Neither really measuresthe number of times an article is “used.” With the adventof online publishing, the ability to measure usage hasbeen transformed by the rigor and accuracy of the tech-nology. Moreover, the rapidly growing use of onlinejournal content has created a new paradigm of journalreadership and has extended the use of even the most spe-cialized and esoteric journals. The problem has been trans-formed from an issue of data capture to one of definition:What type of access is significant enough to constitute asingle “use” of an article?

1

This article reviews the various methods of establish-ing “value,” including a comparison of journal prices atthe journal and the article level, what constitutes “cost

per use,” and other measures that are relevant to the onlineenvironment. Publishers may view these considerations asa simple mathematical calculation of the price chargeddivided by the number of uses made of the journal. Fromthe library’s perspective, however, indirect costs of space,staff, and other overhead add to the direct subscriptioncost for the acquisitions budget of the title concerned.

The objective here is to bring together some empiricaldata from two contrasting publishers, Emerald and theInstitute of Physics Publishing (IOPP).

• Emerald is a commercial journal publisher, for-merly known as MCB UP. It publishes 116 primaryjournals in management, engineering, library andinformation science, applied science, and technol-ogy. It has been criticized for high-priced print jour-nals. Since the late 1990s it has set out to persuadeits customers to use its online full-text database ofjournal articles by providing them at lower pricesand by adding a variety of features for authors andreaders.

• Institute of Physics Publishing is a nonprofit societypublishing thirty-seven research journals in physics,as well as a range of encyclopedias, textbooks, andproceedings. It also publishes magazines and otherresources for schools. IOPP has digitized all of itsjournals back to 1874. It is wholly owned by the In-stitute of Physics, the United Kingdom’s principallearned society for physicists.

Cox

is the principal of John Cox Associates, Rookwood, Brad-den, Towcester, Northants NN12 8ED United Kingdom; e-mail:John.E.Cox@btinernet.com. This article was made possible by the wholehearted coopera-tion of Institute of Physics Publishing and Emerald, and wassupported by a grant from Emerald, for all of which gratefulacknowledgement is made. The views expressed in this articledo not represent the official views of Emerald or of IOPP, andare the sole responsibility of the author.

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John Cox Serials Review

This article compares the data supplied by these twopublishers with other evidence in the published literature,in order to evaluate and compare alternative methods ofmeasuring “value.” While seeking general verification inthe published literature, in using data from just two pub-lishers the author makes a number of arbitrary assump-tions. The principal objective is to indicate that electronicjournals produce cost savings not only in the cost perarticle or cost per use, but also in the overhead costs in-curred by libraries. The author poses some broad conclu-sions in order to invite further research into the economicsof a distribution mechanism that is still in the early stagesof its development.

The Environment

Morgan Stanley Equity Research estimates that academiclibraries in the United States account for about sixty per-cent of the worldwide market for scholarly literature.The libraries get their funding from the university ofwhich they are a part. Within the overall library budget,some forty-six percent represents staff costs, while otheroperating costs account for thirteen percent. Of the re-maining forty-one percent spent on materials, some sixty-three percent is spent on serials—twenty-six percent ofthe total library expenditure. While these figures are basedon U.S. academic libraries, one has no reason to thinkthat funding and expenditure patterns are significantlydifferent in Europe or elsewhere. Libraries spend approx-imately US$1.50 on staff and operating costs for every$1.00 spent on materials.

2

Libraries that are members of the Association of Re-search Libraries spent over sixteen percent of their acqui-sition budgets on electronic resources in 2001, and thisproportion is increasing at a rate of over thirty percent(32.69 in 2000–2001), while library budgets increasedby 9.12% in 2000–2001. Their total electronic serials ex-penditure was approaching $120 million in 2001.

3

The Cost per Journal

Serials expenditures have increased dramatically each yearfrom 1985 to 2000. The median serials unit cost, how-ever, has declined by nearly seven percent, from over$300 in 1999–2000 to slightly under $280 in 2000–2001.This is attributed to three factors:

• Libraries opting for electronic-only subscriptions ata modest discount from the print subscription price

• The reduced unit cost of journals purchased “inbulk” by library consortia—often providing addi-tional titles and spreading the cost among all mem-ber libraries

• The result of initiatives like SPARC (Scholarly Pub-lishing and Academic Resources Coalition) in fo-cusing attention on publishers’ pricing policies.

4

Emerald provides a dramatic contrast between print-plus-online and electronic-only pricing. The EmeraldFulltext database provides access to over 40,000 full-textarticles from Emerald journals dating back to 1994, andis priced at £15,888. In 2002, compared with a total of£280,902 (US $446,630) for all 116 primary journals atthe U.K. institutional subscription rate, the annual sub-scription to the Fulltext database was £15,888 ($25,262).The contrast between Emerald’s print-plus-online andonline prices per journal, per article, and per page isstriking, as shown in Table 1.

Emerald’s decision to shift its business model fromprint to electronic created this striking difference. Emer-ald assumed the risk that its electronic databases mightnot generate revenue sufficient to replace its income fromits individual journal subscriptions. In establishing a newpricing policy, the publisher is encouraging libraries toreplace their Emerald print subscriptions with EmeraldFulltext and is clearly re-engineering its business modelto meet the requirements of the current market.

Institute of Physics Publishing presents less of a con-trast between print and electronic pricing, if only becauseits online-only revenues have so far represented only asmall part of its total revenue. Also, scientific journalshave historically carried higher prices than journals inbusiness and management. IOPP does not offer a full-text database quite like Emerald Fulltext, but it does offerPackage Z, consisting of all its journals at one heavily-discounted price, and the IOPP Archive of 60,000 articlespublished in its journals from 1874 to 1992, at a price of£375 ($550). Its pricing policy is based on the institu-tional print subscription price, which includes online ac-cess to the current volume and a ten-year archive at noextra cost. The IOPP data in Table 1 does not illustratethe price per article or price per page advantage to begained from negotiating a consortium license.

Table 1.

Emerald and Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) journal pricing per title, per article, and per page, 2002

Median price per title Average price per article Average price per pageGB£ US$ GB£ US$ GB£ US$

Emerald

a

Individual journals, print plus electronic 2,421 3,849 68.26 108.50 4.82 7.66Emerald Fulltext Database, electronic only 137 218 3.86 6.14 0.27 0.43

IOPP

b

Individual journals, print plus electronic 798 1,270 3.01 4.79 0.32 0.51

a

Information supplied by Emerald in an e-mail to the author, 22 January 2002. Average prices per article and per page are based on the 4,112 articles and58,191 pages published in 2002, and take no account of the back files also available in the database.

b

Information supplied by IOPP in an e-mail to the author, 13 January 2002. IOPP published 9,287 articles and 87,268 pages in 2002.

Note

: US$ price is the U.K. price converted at the rate of £1.00

�

$1.59.

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Volume 29, Number 2, 2003 Value for Money in Electronic Journals

Price per Use

An expensive journal that is well used may be a bettervalue for the money than a low-priced title that is read in-frequently. In its report on scientific publishing, MorganStanley provided some data to illustrate this point on aselection of scientific and medical titles (Table 2).

Thisreport does not clearly indicate whether these numbersrepresent the use of printed copies, online article down-loads, or a mixture of both. Estimating the use of printedjournals is notoriously difficult because an estimate de-pends on the accuracy of re-shelving counts, which oftendo not consider the use of more than one article within ajournal issue or bound volume, or re-shelving by thereader.

The use of journal literature in electronic form pro-vides rigorous data on access but creates a host of diffi-culties of definition and interpretation. For the purposesof this study, both Emerald and IOPP were asked to ex-clude all free access to table-of-contents information, ab-stracts, or any free access to full-text material. They wereasked to define full-text access as comprising a downloador printing of the article; browsing was not included. Theobjective was not to overstate the “use” of the electronicjournal. The two publishers provided data that identifycosts per online article downloaded or printed. Theywere both requested to provide information on a) num-ber of paid-for article downloads or prints, b) number ofarticles available online by month throughout 2002, andc) revenue generated by online journals and databases.The last measure caused some debate. Online-only sub-scriptions, revenue from licensing online access to con-sortia, and pay-per-view sales made online are clearlywholly generated by the electronic journal. But the mostdifficult—and largest—portion of electronic revenue isthat generated by individual journal subscriptions forboth print and electronic access. The following factorswere considered:

• Some sixty to seventy percent of the cost of publish-ing a journal article is fixed regardless of the me-dium of output, print or electronic. Fixed costs in-clude a) direct costs such as review and refereeing,editorial and illustrative work, and typesetting; andb) indirect costs such as subscription maintenance,

marketing, and author administration. An estimatedaverage of these fixed costs is US$4,000 per article.

5

• Online publishing has not changed these fixedcosts, which still have to be recovered in revenue;moreover, funding is needed for capital investmentin computer and telecommunications equipment,skilled technical staff, and the provision of twenty-four-hour availability and customer service, or foroutsourcing electronic processing and delivery to ahosting service such as Extenza, High Wire Press,Ingenta, or Meta Press. Such costs can range from$2,000 to $40,000 per title.

6

The publishing indus-try will remain divided about whether online pub-lishing leads to higher or lower direct costs until thetransition to an electronic environment is com-pleted. Morgan Stanley’s view is that the savings tobe made in paper, printing, and distribution willmore than offset these additional expenses and leadto improved margins—as much as a sixteen percentincrease in profitability

7

—or to lower or more flex-ible pricing, although this depends on that transi-tion being made. For the foreseeable future mostjournal publishers are likely to output journals inboth print and electronic form.

• Libraries are now spending around twenty percentof their acquisitions budgets on electronic resources.

Whether delivered in print or online, most journalscontinue to have high fixed costs and a low number ofsubscribers. To advance this discussion, the author madea purely subjective judgment, and assumed a compro-mise view that fifty percent of the subscription revenueshould be attributed to the electronic version, if only asa rough rule-of-thumb. The average cost per use in 2002of each publisher was then calculated. the results areshown in Table 3.

Given the assumptions on which thesecalculations have been based and the changing nature ofthe academic library market as the use of electronic in-formation increases at the expense of the printed equiv-alent, the conclusions that one may draw from these fig-ures can only be tentative. Nevertheless, they are echoedby a case study undertaken at Drexel University (Phila-delphia, Pennsylvania) which is commented on in detaillater in this paper.

Table 2.

Journal cost per use

Journal Publisher US$ costNumberof uses $ per use

Brain Research Bulletin

ANKHO [now Elsevier] 2,385 187 12.75

Hospital Medicine

Mark Allen Publishing 398 6 66.33

Advances in Clinical Chemistry

Academic Press [now Elsevier] 98 3 32.67

International Journal of Neuroscience

Gordon & Breach [now Taylor & Francis] 5,922 183 32.36

Archives of Physiology and Biochemistry

Swets & Zeitlinger 496 18 27.56

Brain Behaviour and Evolution

Karger 1,389 52 26.71

Journal of Neuroscience Research

Wiley-Liss 5,095 483 10.56

Brain Research

Elsevier 14,669 1,777 8.25

Sources:

Data from University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries and Morgan Stanley Equity Research Europe report available at http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/morganstanley.pdf (13 February 2003).

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John Cox Serials Review

Benefits of Electronic Delivery to the Library and Its Readers

Anecdotal evidence supports the view that the benefits ofmoving to electronic delivery of journal literature aresignificant. In the United Kingdom, the University ofBristol has found that the only disadvantage in partici-pating in the NESLI use (National Electronic Site Licens-ing Initiative) for

ScienceDirect

has been the reduceduse of—and revenue from—self-service photocopiers inthe library. The benefits, however, have been significant:

8

• Visible savings of GB£7,000 (US$10,000) per yearin binding costs as a result of discontinuing printsubscriptions

• A reduction in the need for space in the library• Access is not dependent on library opening hours

or location• Redeployment of staff to professional duties as a

result of the discontinuation of the manual handlinginherent in check-in, re-shelving, repairs, and pro-cessing interlibrary loan requests

Within the consortium that uses its collective purchas-ing power, the individual libraries benefit. Duplicationwithin and between collections is eliminated. In the stateof Victoria, Australia, CAVAL (Cooperative Action byVictorian Academic Libraries) found that an analysis ofduplicate serials within the academic libraries in Victoriarevealed considerable overlap, with nearly half the serialsbeing held in three libraries or more. Of the 4,000 titlesthat were held on paid subscription, 1,953 titles, orroughly half, were available in electronic form.

9

Readers benefit in that they can access journals oncampus or remotely, whatever the time or day. The liter-ature is delivered to the desktop. Moreover, readers havebeen found to spend much less time locating and obtain-ing library-provided articles when they are availableelectronically.

10

Calculating Operational Cost Savingsin the Library: The Drexel Study

In their extensive review of scholarly publishing ,

11

CarolTenopir and Donald King reviewed library costs and es-timated the following:

• Eliminating issue processing and storage costs saves$0.70 per subscription

• Eliminating photocopying and re-shelving costssaves approximately US$1.50 per reading

• The cost of processing electronic articles on demandis US$12–13 less than a paper-based interlibrary

loan or document delivery transaction; the savingsare much higher on rush orders.

The first systematic analysis of the organizational im-pact of the migration to electronic journals is a case studyby Carol Montgomery and Donald King at Drexel Uni-versity. Their study identified changes in staff, resources,equipment and space needs, and the impact on the library’soperational costs.

12

Drexel was a pioneer in moving to ajournal collection that is now predominantly electronic.The library had 8,600 electronic and 370 print journaltitles in 2002.

The Drexel study is an important contribution to ourknowledge of the full impact of electronic journals in thelibrary cost structure. It examined all costs, includingthose attributed to overhead and fixed costs. Costs ofspace, systems, services, supplies, and staff (summarizedby function) were allocated separately to unbound printjournals (current issues), bound journal volumes, andelectronic journals. Its analysis made a large number ofassumptions, including the following:

• Capital costs like building, library fittings and fix-tures, and computer equipment were amortized overdiffering numbers of years in much the same way asdepreciation is accounted for in the annual accountsof both commercial and nonprofit organizations.

• The cost attributed to the provision of electronicjournals of services and equipment that were alsoused for other purposes, was based on usage.

• The complexity of assessing electronic journal costswas addressed by defining four e-journal catego-ries: individual subscriptions (which, in contrast tothe publisher study described above, were

fully

al-located to the electronic journal), publishers’ pack-ages (whether or not they were part of a consor-tium “deal”), packages of journals from differentpublishers (e.g., Muse, JSTOR) and full-text data-bases of “collections” of electronic journal content(e.g., ProQuest, EBSCO, Gale).

The study revealed the contrast between the unit costof print journals and of electronic journals, particularlyat the level of cost per use. It clearly demonstrated thatthe perception of value changes if cost per use is used asa measure of a journal’s worth. Montgomery and Kingconsider this to be the most meaningful indicator. Theyincluded journals in full-text databases in compiling unitcosts, although those databases are used more for under-graduate teaching than for research and do not form partof the collection designed primarily to support the re-search process. If those full-text databases are excludedin order to make Montgomery and King’s tables more inline with the data from Emerald and IOPP, those tables

Table 3.

Cost per use, January–December 2002

Number of articles available Total downloads

Price per article Average price per usePublisher January December Average GB£ US$ GB£ US$

Emerald 32,091 39,934 36,012 3,062,502 3.86 6.14 3.43 5.46IOPP 117,226 154,882 136,054 3,093,655 3.01 4.79 2.88 4.58

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Volume 29, Number 2, 2003 Value for Money in Electronic Journals

can be consolidated and restated in the summary shownin Table 4

.

Interpreting these figures is fraught with dif-ficulty. The Drexel study acknowledges that the printand electronic use data are not directly comparable. Re-shelving statistics do not measure the number of printedarticles used, while electronic usage data can measureanything from the total number of “hits” on a site to justthe prints or downloads. The analysis is complicatedwhere an electronic journal package, or even an individualsubscription, may include prior year’s volumes bundledin “at no cost.”

The Drexel study, moreover, was conducted in the ab-sence of agreed-upon on standards for how usage datashould be defined and measured. The authors fully ac-knowledge this absence; nevertheless, they maintain thatlarge differences in operational costs per use are signifi-cant: $30 for bound print titles (where eighty percent ofthis cost is attributable to the space they occupy) and$6.00 for current print subscriptions, compared with$0.45 per use for electronic journals.

The Collection Management Initiative, a project eval-uating the comparative operational costs of maintainingprinted and electronic versions of journals in Universityof California libraries during the period October 2001 toSeptember 2002,

13

has yet to issue a final report. There-fore the Drexel study is the only systematic study of hownonsubscription costs are changing in libraries.

The Need for Standards

Measuring the use of online information needs to bedone in a more agreed-upon and consistent way. Bothpublishers and their customers want to know how infor-mation is being used. But to be meaningful, the recordingand reporting of online usage data must be done accordingto international standards. Project COUNTER (CountingOnline Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) re-leased a Code of Practice on 14 January 2003 that spec-ifies and defines the data elements and the format, delivery,frequency, and granularity of output reports with respectto journals and databases. It defines how remote use ofinstitutionally licensed products can be measured. It alsospecifies the methods by which direct usage reports andthose from intermediaries (gateways, aggregators, and

electronic delivery vendors) may be combined.

14

The sig-nificance of COUNTER is that it is a genuinely interna-tional effort, widely supported by librarians, subscriptionagents and other intermediaries, and publishers, as wellas their professional organizations.

Some Tentative Conclusions

Comparing just two of the many scholarly journal pub-lishers and interpreting data using a range of rational butessentially arbitrary assumptions may lead to conclusionsthat are unsupportable. The available evidence, neverthe-less, strongly indicates that electronic journals providesignificant cost advantages in two major respects:

• Publishers can deliver their journal literature elec-tronically at a lower cost per use than in print.

• Libraries incur greater operating costs in dealingwith readers’ requests for printed journals thanthey do for the electronic equivalent.

Taken with the evidence of increased convenience to thereader and greater effectiveness of the library service, theelectronic journal provides incomparably enhanced valuefor money when compared with the traditional printedvolume or issue. These hypotheses need further testingusing a set of internationally agreed-upon definitions—particularly of what constitutes “use”—and data collectionpractices. The Code of Practice published by COUNTERprovides the basis for usage data collection and interpre-tation. This article provides a teasing invitation to fur-ther, more systematic studies across a wide range of pub-lishers, based on compatible data from both publishersand libraries.

Notes

1. Measuring use may become easier with the emergence ofCOUNTER’s internationally agreed-upon standards and definitions,discussed later in this article.

2. Paul Gooden, Matthew Owen, Sarah Simon, and Louise Single-hurst, “Scientific Publishing: Knowledge Is Power” (report preparedfor Morgan Stanley Equity Research Europe, 30 September 2002),http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/morganstanley.pdf (13 Feb-ruary 2003).

Table 4.

Unit cost of electronic and print journals

Journal type SubscriptionCost

per titleRecorded

useSubscription cost

per use

a

Operational cost per use

a

Total cost per use

a

Electronic journalsIndividual subscriptions $73,000 $432 23,000 $3.20 $0.45 $4.00Publisher’s packages $304,000 $134 134,000 $2.25 $0.45 $3.00Multi-publisher packages $27,000 $60 20,000 $1.35 $0.45 $2.00

Total $404,000 $147 177,000 $2.30 $0.45 $2.75

Print JournalsCurrent journals $38,000 $100 15,000 $2.50 $6.00 $8.50Bound Journals N/A N/A 8,800 N/A $30.00 $30.00

Total $38,000 $100 24,000 $2.50 $15.00 $17.50

a

Numbers rounded.

88

John Cox Serials Review

3. Julia Blixrud, “Measures for Electronic Use: The ARL E-MetricsProject” (slide presentation at Statistics in Practice—Measuring & Man-aging, International Federation of Libraries Associations and InstitutionsPre-Conference, Loughborough, U.K., 13

�

15 August 2002), http://www.arl.org/stats/newmeas/emetrics/Blixrud_IFLA02_files/slide0083.htm (16 December 2002).

4.

ARL Statistics 2000

�

01

(Washington, DC: Association of ResearchLibraries), http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/ (16 December 2002).

5. John Cox, “The Great Journals Crisis,”

Logos

9, no. 1 (1998). Seealso Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King, “Designing Electronic Jour-nals with 30 years of Lessons from Print,”

Journal of Electronic Pub-lishing

4, no. 2 (1998).

6. Cox, “The Great Journals Crisis.”

7. Gooden et al., “Scientific Publishing.”

8. Telephone conversation with Peter King, Deputy Librarian.

9. Steve O’Connor, “Research Is the Basis of a Collaborative Solutionfor Academic Libraries: The Victorian Academic Digital Library(VADL),”

Library Management

23, no. 8/9 (2002): 417

�

21.

10. Donald W. King and Carol Hansen Montgomery, “After Migra-tion to an Electronic Journal Collection: Impact on Faculty and Doc-toral Students,”

D-Lib Magazine

8 (December 2002), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december02/king/12king.html (15 January 2003).

11. Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King,

Towards Electronic Journals:Realities for Scientists, Librarians and Publishers

(Washington, DC:Special Libraries Association, 2002).

12. Carol Hansen Montgomery and Donald W. King, “Comparing Li-brary and User Related Costs of Print and Electronic Journal Collections:A First Step Towards a Comprehensive Analysis,”

D-Lib Magazine

8(October 2002), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october02/montgomery/10montgomery.html (16 December 2002).

13. Collection Management Initiative (CMI), http://www.ucop.edu/cmi (16 December 2002).

14. COUNTER—Online Usage of Electronic Resources, http://www.projectcounter.org (15 January 2003).