Journal subscription expenditure of UK higher education institutions

Introduction

The amount of money paid by higher education institutions (HEIs) to access academic journals is of high interest to the academic community, and academic libraries in particular as they are responsible for the vast majority of journal purchases. In light of current trends within academic publishing towards open access models rather than subscription models, the economics of the publishing industry have come under increasing scrutiny, but accurate data about the flow of money within the system is difficult to come by. Libraries do not usually publish details of their expenditure with individual publishers and there is no official source of these data. This situation led to undertaking this research to make journal subscription expenditure openly available.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests were sent to HEIs to obtain the data. While the authors considered using a diplomatic approach and asking individual libraries to publish their data, this would have taken a considerable amount of time, and while some libraries may have been happy to publish the data themselves, others may not have seen the value in it. The situation is also complicated by the fact that some publishers insist on having non-disclosure clauses in their contracts with libraries, which prohibit them from disclosing some aspects of the deals. The UK’s Freedom of Information Act (2000) overrides these clauses and allows full data to be obtained by sending FOI requests.

It is hoped that the data contained within this dataset will contribute to a better informed discussion surrounding the issue of how scholarly communication could or should be funded. Further research could undertake a similar endeavour in the 100 other countries (McIntosh, 2014) which have FOI laws, in order to work towards understanding the costs of scholarly communication on a global scale.

Materials and methods

A list of HEIs was created based on UK institutions which the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA, n.d.) collects data about. The list was not fully comprehensive because it excluded some Welsh universities which have recently undergone restructuring, and the authors were unclear on how to represent the expenditure of merged institutions across different years. In order to obtain data which cover the majority of HEI journal expenditure, seven of the largest publishers of academic journals were chosen (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Sage, OUP, and CUP). An individual known to the authors sent similar request to Russell Group universities for Wiley, Springer, and OUP earlier in 2014, so that these requests were not duplicated and the authors hope to incorporate that data at a later stage.

Each institution was then sent three separate FOI requests via the website whatdotheyknow.com, which sends FOI requests on behalf of UK citizens. The site was chosen because it places all correspondence in the public domain indefinitely, thus ensuring that the data will be verifiable. The three requests were grouped as follows: Group 1 - Wiley, Springer, OUP; Group 2 - Taylor & Francis, Sage, CUP; Group 3 - Elsevier. The groupings were chosen to ensure that each request would not be too onerous for an HEI to respond to, as stipulated under the UK’s FOI law. Elsevier data were requested separately because the nature of their contract with libraries means that the institution must contact Elsevier when it receives a request, thus increasing the time burden on institutions.

The figures should include payments made directly to the publishers as well as any payments made to subscription agents or intermediaries for the purchase of, and/or access to, the publishers' academic journals. Institutions were asked to provide data for the payment for journal packages such as Jisc Collections’ NESLi agreement, as well as for individual journals, and to include VAT where possible. Since the authors are relying solely on data provided by the HEIs it is not possible to independently verify whether all of these aspects of the requests have been adhered to. While this may result in some inaccuracies in individual figures, the authors do not consider that the overall scale will be unduly affected.

Data were requested for five calendar years (2010–14). Some institutions provided data in financial years, which for UK academic institutions is from August-July. In these cases the financial year was mapped on to the second of the two years, for example 2009–10 was mapped on to 2010. This is because although during the financial year 2009–10 it is possible that the money was actually transferred during 2009, it will have been used to pay for subscriptions for 2010.

The dataset is now well-populated but incomplete because at the time of writing, out of the 429 FOI requests that were sent there are still 91 outstanding for which data has not yet been provided. Further data will be incorporated into the dataset as it becomes available.

Data availability

Data can be accessed directly via Figshare at http://figshare.com/articles/Journal_subscription_costs_FOIs_to_UK_universities/1186832, http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1186832 (Lawson & Meghreblian, 2014).

Data were obtained from each institution sending separate FOI requests via the website whatdotheyknow.com. Requests can be viewed individually at https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/stuart_lawson#foi_requests and https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/ben_meghreblian#foi_requests.