Release notes: http://openscience.fi/-/transparency-and-openness-to-scienti...
And data: https://avointiede.fi/web/openscience/publisher_costs
For example, publisher Taylor & Francis has costs have increased more than 20% per year in 2014 and 2015.
All numbers are for 2011
Finland GDP: $273.7B USD (1)
public expenditure on education: 6.8% (2)
calculated expenditure on education: $18.6B USD
total cost for academic journals: $21.5M USD ($19M EUR) (3)
journal cost as % of yearly university funding: 0.12%
enrolled university students: 168,983 (4)
yearly cost per student for academic journals: $112 USD
(1) https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&... (2) http://www.oecd.org/edu/Education-at-a-Glance-2014.pdf (3) http://openscience.fi/publishercosts (4) http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__kou__y...
The BIGGEST Scam running over a decade now. The digital subscriptions are for back ordered journals. These journals sat in boxes behind the current issue and you had to look up an index to find what you needed.
So instead of making 100% of their money on current issues they have now made it where they make 90% of their money on old content that was making them nothing but they get to charge 10 times more and obscure journals get a larger paid audience.
Research issues are mostly paid with tax payer money or non-profits and the profits go to delivery companies. This reminds me of Apple Apps and Google Play's 30% profits.
LOCKED OUT are the paying public. I no longer am in academic work anymore (Gladly) and I no longer can look up research. Really sucked when my son had cancer.
Some more information on the boycott appears in [1] and at Tim Gower's blog [2].
[1] http://thecostofknowledge.com/ [2] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-so...
So all this to say that there are a lot of intricacies in this data, and without the context a lot of it is misleading. Taylor and Francis didn't increased their prices by 20x in 2014.
Another example is where the post cites differences among publishers when looking at "cost per citation" (which alone is a dubious metric). This is going to be entirely dependent on field of study. Certain fields, like bio and physics have massively higher citation rates per paper than fields like humanities and social sciences. Publishers (like SAGE) who focus on social sciences are going to have vastly fewer citations per article than publishers with an STM focus. But the value of a journal (either defined as the actual cost or in more theoretical ways) isn't simply directly tied to citation counts. I'd argue that's a good thing, but I suppose you could debate it. But I raise the issue only to point out that "revenue per citation" types of metrics are almost entirely related to the fields of research and not publishers over or under charging for the same content relative to each other.
