The amount paid by UK universities to subscribe to journals from some large publishers has risen by almost 50 per cent since 2010, new data suggest.
The finding is based on freelance requests under the Freedom of Information Act to more than 100 universities by Ben Meghreblian, an independent researcher, and Stuart Lawson, a research analyst at Jisc Collections. The researchers asked each institution how much it had spent over the past five years on subscribing to journals from seven of the largest publishers.
They found that the amount paid to Oxford University Press rose by 49.2 percent between 2010 and 2014. The amount paid to Springer rose by 36.3 percent and the amount to Wiley by 33.5 percent. The smallest rise – 17.4 percent – was in subscriptions to Elsevier journals. Overall expenditure increased by 23.9 percent.
According to Lawson, he had made the FoI requests to instigate a better-informed conversation about the cost of publishing in an era of increasing open access. Many institutions and funders have recently begun publishing the amount that they spend in open-access article fees. However, information on the amount paid in subscription fees has typically been masked in confidentiality agreements between libraries and publishers.
The lid began to be lifted earlier this year by Tim Gowers, Royal Society 2010 anniversary research professor at the University of Cambridge, who unearthed figures on how much Russell Group members pay for subscriptions to Elsevier journals.
Writing in a posting earlier this month on the London School of Economics' Impact of Social Sciences blog, Lawson and Meghreblian say that their data could be used by libraries to compare their subscription expenditure, and by open access advocates to examine whether publishers' subscription charges also take into account articles whose authors have already paid an open access fee: a phenomenon dubbed 'doubledipping'.
However, Lawson admitted that this would be difficult without additional information since, despite the rise of open access, the number of articles published under the subscription model is still increasing.
