From 1990 to 2008, total price increases ranged from 238% (astronomy) to 537% (general science); that's 3.7 and 8.3 times the increase in the CPI [consumer price index], respectively.
Would the publishers care to tell us how this is the case?
I thought of drawing a graph to show the difference between Information Research and other 'Platinum track' journals and the priced publications but, on reflection, I felt that a graph showing an annual zero percent increase from a base of zero would not be particularly interesting! (Later - in a comment, Bill Hooker points out that the flat line is interesting evidence that some publishing models can keep costs down. I'm happy to be able to support that!)
2 comments:
Seems I only ever come by here to disagree with you...
"...would not be particularly interesting" -- I, well, disagree. :-)
That flat line for IR is proof positive that, for some models, journal production costs can actually be managed such that pricing is kept *below* the CPI. Such models might not scale to, say, biomed research (high volume of submissions, wider range of data types to display, and so on) but production cost information is so hard to come by that *any* such information is useful!
Thanks for that, Bill - I'll modify the post accordingly :-)
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