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E-journal issues

The e-journal issues generally refer to a situation in which the price of e-journals rises every year, making it difficult for universities and other institutions to subscribe to e-journals, making it impossible to maintain the academic information infrastructure. First of all, there are several reasons journal prices can increase every year. The first reason is that the costs of publisher editing systems and posting / publishing systems are increasing. The number of papers is increasing worldwide (up 4.5% annually on a global average) against the background that research achievements are measured by paper evaluations (such as citation counts). As a result, the costs of publishers to keep up with the increasing number of papers are increasing. The second reason is that competition between publishers is difficult to work due to the increasing oligopoly of publishers. The third reason is that journals have the uniqueness of being a product that cannot be replaced by other journals. For these reasons, negotiations with publishers can suppress the rise in journal prices, but cannot fundamentally solve the problem of not raising journal prices permanently.

Under these circumstances, from around 2000, a subscription model called “Big Deal”, which sells electronic journals in packages, has appeared. Big Deal was a model that could greatly increase the number of accessible journals (electronic) by adding a small subscription fee to the subscription fee of the print journal that the university had previously subscribed to. As a result, Big Deal has spread rapidly around the world.

Big Deal before after

The average price of print journals has risen globally since 1990: 8.7% a year in humanities and social sciences and 8.2% a year in natural sciences. On the other hand, the average for e-journals has been increasing since 2012 at 5.5% per year for humanities and social sciences and 4.4% per year for natural sciences. Although the price increase rate of e-journals is lower than that of print journals, Big Deal has a large contract amount, so even a rise of about 4 to 5% every year has gradually squeezed the library budget. As a result, it has been recognized as an issue by universities around the world. Recently, large universities in Japan have begun to cancel Big Deal. The reason is that, in addition to the constant price increase of the Big Deal, foreign products are being taxed, which is susceptible to foreign exchange trends, and the budget of university libraries is decreasing.

However, it is dangerous to cancel Big Deal easily. One thing to keep in mind when deciding to cancel Big Deal is that individual e-journal contracts can result in even higher price increases. For this reason, even if you can temporarily reduce the subscription fee by canceling Big Deal and greatly reducing the number of titles that can be subscribed, it will return to the level of the subscription fee before the cancellation in a few years. Universities that have canceled Big Deal will have to put a lot of effort into selecting electronic journals between libraries and researchers. Individual e-journals that have been painstakingly selected will then increase in price in the following year, requiring additional e-journals to be canceled.

In this way, the rising price of journals has threatened the scholarly information infrastructure worldwide. As a movement of researchers to overcome this situation, the Open Access (OA) movement to publish papers on the web for free has emerged.

Big Deal cancel

Revised 2020.1.15