LISU Responds to Elsevier Complaint Over Pricing Study
The Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU) at Loughborough University in the UK has responded to STM publisher Elsevier, which maintains that an LISU pricing study overstates Elsevier’s median price for biomedical journals (See: http://ic-server02.info-commons.uiowa.edu/scholar/archives/195/).
Although LISU officials acknowledged Elsevier’s finding that some "abstracting/indexing/current awareness" titles were included inadvertently in its sample, they stood by the study’s central findings. In a letter to LIBRARY JOURNAL, LISU director Eric Davies offered adjusted figures, recalculated by excluding the above mentioned titles, reducing slightly Elsevier’s 2004 median for biomedical titles. In addition, although LISU researchers dispute Elsevier’s claim to include a small number of journals the publisher considered to be biomedical titles in its sample, researchers nevertheless recalculated their figures to include those disputed titles, a result that reduced Elsevier’s median price for a biomedical title in 2004 to £656 ($1194) vs. £731 ($1336) originally reported in the study.
In their own analysis, Elsevier argued that a large number of their biomedical journals were excluded, contending that their median price per title is closer to £401 ($730), based on 790 titles analyzed–thus overstated by 81 percent in the LISU study. LISU, however, stood by their methodology, with the exceptions above, noting that the additional 200-plus titles Elsevier factored into their calculations were Harcourt titles in 2000 and were thus excluded. "The purpose of the work was to analyze price changes," wrote Eric Davies, director of LISU. "It was therefore important that titles which had changed publisher, ceased to exist or were new launches during the period of study should not be included. A majority of the titles specified in Elsevier’s criticism as being overlooked were published by Harcourt in 2000, and so not included on that basis." Elsevier bought Harcourt in late 2000 and officially finished the deal in 2001.
To view the LISU study, go to: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dils/lisu/pages/publications/oup.html
Library Journal Academic Newswire, The Publishing Report, June 9, 2005
