Comments on: The Consumer Price Index and the Argument for OA

By: A Shrinking Piece of the University Pie « The Scholarly Kitchen

A Shrinking Piece of the University Pie « The Scholarly Kitchen — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:31:38 +0000

[...] ARL expenditures with university spending, and the trend doesn’t look so grim. While library material costs have increased at a faster rate than the consumer price index (CPI), they look tame compared to the skyrocketing expenses going on elsewhere on campus. Part of this [...]

By: Poor Comparison Leaves Darnton’s Journal Price Jeremiad in Jambles « The Scholarly Kitchen

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:41:25 +0000

[...] previous posts, I argued that the Consumer Price Index was a very bad comparison for measuring the purchasing power of libraries, that journals are the wrong indicator for growth, and that describing the present situation as a [...]

By: marty

marty — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:02:39 +0000

I agree that there is no serials crisis as depicted by librarians once they take into account the growth in the scientific literature. I once took a look at JBC over the same time period used by ARL and discovered that their prices had increased by 400%. However, when I looked at the increase in pages published, I discovered the same 400% increase. I would be interested in seeing how the growth in pages parallels the increase in prices for a wide-range of journals, especially those of society publishers.

By: bill

bill — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:16:11 +0000

I don’t see a lot of difference, for the purposes of comparison with serials costs, between the HEPI, CPI or the “all commodities” PPI:

http://www.sennoma.net/main/archives/2009/06/pick_an_index_any_index.php

By: Steve Hitchcock

Steve Hitchcock — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:03:02 +0000

Phil, An unusual take on the validity of the ‘serials crisis’. I take a simple view, and it heads in the same direction. There is no ‘serials crisis’. More accurately it is a library crisis. There are three players in the serials business: publishers, authors and libraries. Only the libraries see a ‘crisis’. That’s why when open access is justified on this basis, it doesn’t take off. There are better reasons for open access.