Scholarly Communication and Publishing Issues

What Stanford is Doing: Expensive Journals Profile

Key Points — Public Version of SUL’s Expensive Journals Profile

• The list only includes titles that cost $1,000 or more dollars in 2004. It excludes data about journals that cost less than $1,000 and subscriptions to other types of serials (e.g. newspapers, databases). The profile also excludes expensive journal subscriptions from the Business, Law, Medical, Hoover Institution, and Stanford Linear Accelerator Libraries.
• The “list price” or the published price for acquiring the print version of an individual journal title. Note that Stanford rarely pays the list price for a journal. While we are eligible for discounts in some cases, most of the time we have to pay vendor surcharges, taxes, shipping costs, and premiums for electronic access—all factors that usually result in our prices being higher than list price.
• Use Data: This data should not be considered comprehensive for the campus. Use of the print version is for a particular copy of a title, not all copies held on campus. In some cases, libraries (e.g. Green Library) have not compiled usage data for unbound issues of journals so use of the print copies appears to be lower than it really is. Online usage data is the number of full-text displays for a journal title. All electronic journal usage data is based on data compiled by the journal publishers or journal suppliers.
• While best efforts were made to transcribe and compile data accurately, it is possible that errors occurred.
• Ratings data for Journals: The 2003 Edition of ISI’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) was used to compile Impact Factors and the number of times a journal title was cited.

For more details about definitions, caveats, and sources used when compiling data for the Expensive Journals Profile, please see Definitions document.