The Berkeley Electronic Press: the new standard in scholarly publishing

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The Scholarly Communication Crisis

• Academic libraries are suffering from a double whammy
• The explanation: large publishers are enjoying their market power
• The Berkeley Electronic Press is trying to help libraries and scholars
• Journal prices on a per page basis
• Journal price increases are on a per journal basis
• Mergers and acquisitions raise prices
• The Big Deals
• Alternative publishing models
• Institutional repositories – part of the answer
• References and further reading

Academic libraries are suffering from a double whammy

Scientific knowledge and journal offerings have expanded rapidly in the last twenty years. This alone would be difficult for libraries to accommodate, but at the same time prices have soared. For example, the price of library subscriptions to periodicals in law, medicine, and physical science rose by 205 percent, 479 percent, and 615 percent between 1984 and 2001, a period when the overall price increases as reflected in the CPI was 70 percent. See Edlin and Rubinfeld [2004]. In contrast, research library budgets have only increased by 4% per year, on average, between 1990-2003.(See http://www.arl.org/ for detailed statistics.) Even well endowed libraries suffer.

Librarians are up in arms over the scholarly communication crisis and frustrated that they cannot serve their campuses and communities sufficiently. In 1998 librarians and others founded SPARC in an effort to take action. Many also met at a conference in Tempe, Arizona in 2000, and agreed upon "Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing". They called upon university communities to develop strategies to contain the costs of scholarly information so that access to relevant publications for faculty and students can be maintained and even expanded.
(See: http://www.aau.edu/issues/Principles5.10.00.html). Numerous other meetings and panels have addressed this topic since then.

The explanation: large publishers are enjoying their market power

Why are prices going up so fast? Large publishers have enormous market power, and are exploring just how much. Journal outlets are increasingly owned by a small handful of large commercial publishers. When these journals charge high prices and offer poor service, a massive defection is desirable, but organizing a simultaneous switch is difficult. As a result, these journals can charge high prices and can often get away with offering poor service. They can be slow at processing papers both before and after acceptance. Both high prices and poor service are ways of enjoying market power.

The Berkeley Electronic Press is trying to help libraries and scholars

We are eager to start new journals in growing areas of scholarship and are committed to maintaining reasonable price levels and serving authors with efficient and timely reviewing and publishing. So far, our business model has proven successful, and we have gained widespread acceptance among both researchers and the library community. We are grateful for the support of both.

As to service, Ellison [2002] reports that in economics, the average time to final publication is almost three years. The B.E. economics journals in contrast guarantee an editor's decision within ten weeks and fulfill that guarantee 95% of the time. For scholars this allows timely publication. For researchers and libraries, this means more timely materials.

The section below provides detailed information on price levels, annual price increases, and price increases following mergers and acquisitions. It also points you to other pertinent information about the publishing crisis, who the major players are, and what efforts are being made to improve the situation through alternative models.

Journal prices on a per article basis

Table 1: Price Per Article and % Change

	2002 price per article	2004 price per article	% change in price per article
All Journals	13.74	15.33	12%
For-Profit Journals	18.33	20.41	11%
Non-Profit Journals	5.53	7.13	29%
bepress Journals	14.56	8.72	-40%

Source for industry averages: Theodore C. Bergstrom and Preston McAfee, Journal Cost Effectiveness 2006, http://www.journalprices.com and Journal Cost Effectiveness 2004, http://www.journalprices.com/2002.

Note 1: The Berkeley Electronic Press provides institution-wide desktop access. Many publishers charge extra for such a service, in which case paying the prices in Table 1 gives an institution only a single copy of a paper to be shared throughout the institution.

Analysis

Prices of for-profit journals far exceed those of non-profits. This may, of course, explain why for-profits have chosen to greatly expand their journal offerings over the past two decades, while non-profits have created relatively few new journals.

In the meantime, bepress is getting closer and closer to the price per article of non-profit publishers, which has been a company-wide goal from the outset.

Some of the larger firms in the for-profit sector set prices that far exceed those of the average for-profit: Elsevier's average title price was 642% higher than the industry-wide average title price for all subjects for 2003 (see California Digital Library, 2003); for titles in economics it is 1,428% higher. (Based on 2003 Bowker Annual table entitled "U.S. Periodicals: Average Prices and Price Indexes"; Elsevier averages from list prices.)

The Berkeley Electronic Press price per-page is much lower than other for profit publishers and is falling fast at a rate of 13-25% per year, whereas other publishers are raising their prices. This means that once a library subscribes, it has the reasonable expectation that continuing to subscribe will not be burdensome; this is an important goal of bepress.

Knowledge is expanding quickly and so, too, are the number of journals. The non-profit sector does not seem to have the appropriate incentives to fill the void. The Berkeley Electronic Press is trying to step up by creating new journals as the for-profit industry traditionally has, but reasonably priced new journals. As we grow, we are lowering our per page prices, not raising them.

Journal price increases are on a per journal basis

Price increases are more disturbing to libraries than price level. Prices have increased extremely rapidly over the past two decades, far outstripping inflation or the growth of library budgets. These increases have been concentrated in the for-profit sector, a fact that causes libraries particular difficulties, as these are also the companies that have been most rapidly expanding their journal collections. See Bergstrom [2001], at 189.

Between 1984 and 2002, the price of science journals increased by nearly 600 percent. See Susman and Carter [2003], p. 14.

In contrast, as shown below, the Berkeley Electronic Press does not raise the price of journals from year to year, and has steadily lowered the average prices of its journals by offering new journals at low prices. The inflation-adjusted prices have fallen each year by even more, of course. These numbers demonstrate, we think, that the bepress model is a sustainable model from the perspective of libraries. Recall that as Table 1 showed, while other publishers' price per article has increased by 11-29% over the past years, our price per article has fallen by 40%.

Table 2: Average cost per title: industry averages and bepress journals

	Average % price change, 2001-2006	2006 average prices
All Social Science Journals	47%	$550.50
All Science Journals	44%	$1479.50
bepress Journals	-16%	$270

Source for industry averages: Table 5 in Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born "Journals in the Time of Google: Periodicals Price Survey 2006." Library Journal, 4/15/2006, http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6321722.html .

Note: the per-journal price for all bepress journals is found by summing the list prices of all journals and dividing by the total number of journals in our collection of that publication year; it does not account for consortial or multiyear discounts, which may bring prices even lower.

Mergers and acquisitions raise prices

Librarians have long opposed publisher mergers and acquisitions, believing that they lead to substantial price increases.

• Mark McCabe [2004, 2002, 1999 – see references below] has documented that prices do in fact increase as a result of mergers and acquisitions.
• The University of California says that mergers increase publisher prices 20-30%. Click here for details.
• The Berkeley Electronic Press has not increased prices following either of its acquisitions. We have acquired two journals: Business and Politics from Carfax in 2003, and Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics from MIT Press in 2002. Although both journals originally had very low institutional prices (in fact, MIT Press was unable to sustain Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics at its price and subscription levels), our business model and cost structure allowed us to keep these journals vibrant without raising prices. And we have increased the subscription base and submission rate of the journals as well.

The Big Deals

Several years ago some large commercial publishers began offering huge bundles of journals in electronic format. Through this arrangement, universities got desktop access to their existing journals and in some cases gained access to new journals they previously could not afford. That was the good news. The bad news was that the universities had to commit not to lower their expenditures. In fact, the total bundle price continued to rise, as the prices of journals within the bundles were jacked up and as more journals were added to the bundles.

Many librarians found the deals extremely attractive. Others, like Ken Frazier of the University of Wisconsin, decried the lack of choice they implied for librarians. In the bundled deal, librarians buy the weak journals along with the strong, the field journals along with the general-interest journals.

For new publishers like The Berkeley Electronic Press, other publishers' Big Deals pose a problem. Some librarians tell us specifically that they would buy our journals and cut a weaker and much more expensive Elsevier title, but that option is not available. Other librarians say, more generally, that they would spend much more money on smaller or alternative publishers if they were not buying the Big Deal.

See Edlin and Rubinfeld [2004] for an analysis of the anticompetitive strategic barrier to entry that Elsevier and others have erected with their bundled Big Deals.

Librarians are putting their money where their mouths are

Some schools like Stanford have never bought into the Big Deals. They consider the ability to cancel titles and receive proportionate savings just too important. Others have recently rejected the Big Deals and begun to buy journals a la carte, despite the enormous expense and labor involved and the number of titles that they can't afford as a result. Harvard, Cornell and the Research Triangle schools have all moved away from the Big Deal to a title-by-title purchasing entailing substantial cuts in new acquisitions and renewals. Click here for details.

Alternative publishing models

The Berkeley Electronic Press is by no means the only player dedicated to providing scholars with great products and service and librarians with value for their money. Some of the many others doing so at present are:

• Economics Bulletin
• Journal of the European Economic Association
• Public Library of Science
• BioMed Central

Institutional repositories – part of the answer

As a response to the slowness and expense of traditional journals, faculty have begun to post their work in online open-access repositories as an alternative. Major collections have been established by the California Digital Library, Boston College, Southampton University, and MIT's Dspace. For further background on institutional repositories, please click here.

References and further reading

• Economics, Business, and Marketing
• Law
• Political Science, Policy, and International Studies
• Health and Medicine
• Science and Technology

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