Elsevier: LISU Study on Pricing “Misleading”
Industry-leading STM publisher Elsevier has taken aim at a serials pricing study, commissioned by Oxford University Press and carried out by the Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU) at Loughborough University in the UK, which placed Elsevier’s "median" price for biomedical journals at the top of 11 publishers at £731 per title ($1336). The LISU study was recently referenced in LIBRARY JOURNAL’s 2005 Periodical Price survey (April 15, 2005) as an "exhaustive" study, adding that librarians "looking for comprehensive cost/value analysis will find a wealth of data in the report." Unfortunately, contends Elsevier director of research Mayur Amin, the data in the LISU is both incomplete and rife with errors. In a letter to LIBRARY JOURNAL, a portion of which will be published in the June 15 issue, Amin noted that only 11 of "several hundred" publishers were included in the study and that some sizable publishers were omitted, potentially skewing the results.
More critically, however, Amin claims that, of Elsevier’s 589 biomedical titles used in the LISU study, 57 of those titles "are not scholarly journals but sections of abstracting and indexing databases or services" and that "over 290 legitimate biomedical journals" are excluded. The result is that that the median price for Elsevier biomedical journals quoted in the LISU study is overstated by hefty 81 percent. "Any comparison based on such a huge error is clearly misleading," Amin wrote. In a detailed critique of the LISU study, shared with the LJ Academic Newswire, Amin’s own analysis concluded that the median price for 790 Elsevier titles was closer to £401 ($733). Amin told the LJ Academic Newswire he has alerted LISU and OUP officials of his findings and is awaiting their review of the data and methods. LISU officials, contacted by email, did not comment by press time, but Amin said that both responded to him, telling him they would review their study and respond to Amin’s findings.
[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), May 24, 2005]
