Postgraduate student at Djanogly Learning Resource Centre.
each year of a multiyear deal) to ensure that academics and authors know which titles are eligible for publishing, and readers know what content is accessible. Moving journals in and out of bundles can also disrupt authors who are plan- ning their manuscript submission, where changes to eligible titles can result in authors finding that the costs associated with open access publishing are met one year but not in the following year.
Publish
Although complex, there are established data sources, methodologies and indica- tors that are used when analysing value for money in Read.
Attempts to replicate or provide an equivalent to these principles when reviewing VFM in relation to publishing is challenging and complex, not least because Publish data is not as consistent or established as Read data.
Methodology
Reviewing an agreement’s Publishing value begins by establishing which methodology was applied to its pricing. However, there is no consensus among publishers about which methodology to base publishing prices on. For most agreements, publishing prices of TAs have been based on two methodologies: One is previous APC spend (total or average spend on individual articles over
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a given number of years based on the corresponding author’s affiliation – more on this below).
The other is publication rates, specifically the total or average number of articles published over a given number of years, based on the corresponding author’s affiliation.
The lack of agreed methodology and data standards for the Publish element means that any analysis requires signif- icant investment in terms of staff time spent on data collation and confirmation. There is also still a risk that the analysis will be inconsistent with the publisher’s methodology.
For example, one publisher costed an agreement by using the date they approved the article for publication. The preferred date University of Notting- ham Libraries use for our evaluation is actual publication date, identified via the Scopus database. This left seven articles within their methodology but outside of ours. Potentially small margins, but when agreements are costed per article with an APC value in the thousands of pounds, a few differentials can make a significant impact on cost.
Data
Methodological inconsistencies aside, we have found that data in Scopus has solved most of our problems in getting data. It has the granularity we need per
article – published date, corresponding author affiliation and article funder. However, gaps emerge when a journal isn’t indexed in Scopus, which has relatively low coverage in the Arts and Humanities.
Publication forecast
To achieve our goal of understanding the VFM of the publishing element we are looking at historic rates of spend or publishing depending on the methodol- ogy, which whilst useful in establishing past patterns, is not an indicator of where our academics will publish in the future.
It is difficult to forecast Publish patterns accurately. On a fundamen- tal level readers are predictable, they depend on a pool of existing literature while writers expand that pool. Also, researchers and authors are directly exposed to, and reacting to, the world outside the institution. And the rela- tionship of authors to their institutions is not the same as readers, they can start and finish their employment through- out the year and often take or bring their research expertise with them. A formal illustration of the difference between readers and authors is that, for authors, there is no equivalent of an advertised curriculum anchored with a student body. A curriculum brings rela- tive commitment and assurance to make suitable review and purchasing decisions.
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