Paris

Journals produced by not-for-profit organizations are generally better value for money than those of commercial publishers. This is the conclusion of a study by the University of Wisconsin library of the costs and impacts of journals in physics, neuroscience and economics.

The data were collected last year to commemorate a famous study carried out a decade earlier by Henry Barschall for the American Institute of Physics. The original study came to prominence when the Swiss-based publisher Gordon & Breach, whose journals fared badly in the study, sued the institute (whose journals came off well).

Earlier this year, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit threw out Gordon & Breach's case, concluding that the study was reliable, and that publication and promotional use of a survey of journal prices did not constitute false or misleading advertising(see Nature 397, 464; 1999). Barschall died before the verdict was known.

The new study confirms that the trends highlighted by Barschall still exist, for example, the wide variation in the cost of journals per 1,000 characters. Physics journals varied by a factor of 36, for example, from 0.76 cents to 27.33 cents. Even greater variation was found when journals were assessed on their ‘impact factor’, a value ranging from 0.2 to 182 cents.

Of the three fields included in the study, the average cost per 1,000 characters was lowest in physics at 9.84 cents; the cost for economics journals was 10.60 and that for neuroscience journals 13.83.

But in terms of cost-effectiveness, as measured by the ratio of cost to impact, neuroscience, at 7.7, emerged better than physics journals (11.5) and much better than economics publications (29.8); a lower ratio denotes better cost-effectiveness.

Ten years after the Barschall study, not-for-profit publishers again emerged in general as a better bargain in terms of cost/impact than commercial publishers. Commercial journals scored worse than not-for-profit journals in all three disciplines: 14.61 versus 8.23 in physics, 42.62 versus 11.55 in economics and 8.69 versus 0.64 in neuroscience.

Naturewas not included in the study. But data also gathered by Wisconsin library on the use of thousands of its journals show Nature to be one of the most cost-effective journals in terms of ‘cost per use’ (http://www.wisc.edu/wendt/journals/costben/stee8.pdf).

Nature's average cost-per-use was 62 cents last year, and as low as 18 cents at one library. In contrast, over 600 journals had cost-per-uses of more than $45, with some as high as $700.