More on the pricing crisis

Anthea Lipsett, Journals spending soars to £100m, squeezing book budgets, Times Higher Education Supplement, October 6, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers).  (Thanks to Colin Steele.)  Excerpt:

Academics and universities spend nearly £100 million a year subscribing to journals, according to the latest figures reported by the Research Information Network.

The report on scholarly journals says that the number of serial subscriptions has more than doubled over the past ten years to a mean value of 6,900 titles per institution, costing UK universities and academics £94.5 million in subscriptions in 2003-04....

Toby Bainton, secretary of the Society of College, National and University Libraries, said: "It's a lot of money and it's a monopoly product. If you want the journal Brain Research, you can't think 'that's too expensive, I'll buy another' because only that one will do."

Over the past ten years, library expenditure as a proportion of total university spending has gone down from just over 3 per cent to just under 3 per cent, he said. But, over the past five years, the amount universities spend on books and journals has risen 13.6 per cent. The price of serial subscriptions has gone up by 50 per cent.

"There's something unsustainable in the system and it will have to be addressed, or things will go badly wrong," Mr Bainton said....

The report does not disaggregate the amount spent by universities from individual subscriptions. But it said that half of all researchers struggle to access research journals....