Success and Failure of New Journals

The last couple weeks had me thinking about new journals. 

I "attended" a webinar from bepress, the company that supplies the software for OpenSIUC, called "Journal Make-Over: Practical Steps to Better Journals." A lot of the webinar was about helping fledgling journals develop. The gist that I got out of it was that editors for new journals need to build up a steady stream of submissions and articles to publish. Approaches that would make the journal look desperate could backfire. The stream has to be built through personal networking with potential authors and editorial board members. 

A few days later, a librarian encouraged other librarians on an email list. He encouraged people to contact Thomson Reuters to include a fairly new journal (started in the last five years) from a scholarly society publisher in Web of Science.

I also saw  "New Journals in Education and Psychology: General Trends, Discoverability, and Ubiquitous Journals of the Decade, 2000–2009" in College & Research Libraries. In it, Bernadette Lear found that new journals in education and in psychology from big for-profit publishers were more likely to receive coverage from indexing and abstracting databases and be listed in library collections than new journals from colleges and universities, small for-profits and societies.

One of Lear's other findings was that more than 83% of the new journals in her study that started in 2000-2005 were still publishing in 2010. To put that in perspective, Lear provides a footnote that over half of new magazines fail in the first five years. Heck, the high rate of new business failure is the stuff of urban legend -- though research puts it at about five ninths failing in the first four years.

To me the success rate defies economic logic. How can so many new journals appear year after year with so few failing? Why don't more of them fail? Where would libraries get the money to pay for the new journals? A few big research libraries can find a way to subscribe to new journals (maybe), but college and university libraries aren't faring that well. With the high inflation rate on existing journals, new subscriptions have to be offset by cost cutting somewhere else. Are the costs of production so low that the commercial publishers can release new ones ad infinitum and turn a profit on them from a handful of subscriptions?

Big Deals and Opportunity Costs

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article recently the decision at Morris Library and other libraries to drop out of ‘Big Deals.’ David Fowler and Jonathan Nabe gave a conference presentation about the topic, and the article was based largely on that presentation.

Both the Chronicle article and the subsequent comments emphasize the raw dollar cost of the deals and of dropping out of them. Some of the comments note that when they examined their usage statistics, they realized that it would cost more to offer the same level of access to journals in their Big Deal if they dropped out.

When the inflation rate for journals outstrips inflation and the library’s collections budget lags behind inflation, it means the library is going to offer less of something. In the last decade, there were big cuts to the journals outside the Big Deals. It had reached the point that not dropping out of the Big Deal would amount to cancelling subscriptions to important journals from societies and small publishers that weren’t in a position to have a Big Deal.

If you think that the library should have cut something other than journals, please keep in mind that from 2004-2005 to 2008-2009, the serials spending at Morris Library, the Law Library, and the Medical Library in Springfield went from $5.5 million to $6 million. The total (non-capital) library expenditures for that same time went from $14.6 million to $15.2 million. A lot of the cuts already were coming from something other than journal subscriptions. (These numbers come from the ARL Statistics and are not constant dollars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator, $14.6 million in 2005 is $16 million in 2009 dollars).

We were not looking at how much it would cost to keep the same level of access; it was looking at what loss of access would be the least painful. 

Table of Contents for New Issues of Favorite Journals Delivered to You

If you have a favorite journal that you want to see as soon as a new issue comes out, you probably can have its table of contents emailed to you, even if you aren't a subscriber. This service is standard for the major publishers and are available for many smaller publishers too.
The publishers want to get as much traffic to their articles as they can, so they usually allow tables of contents to be sent regardless of whether you or Morris Library subscribes to the journal.

Typically the email will have a list of articles in the latest issue with a hyperlink to the journal's site for the abstract and article. Many also can send the alerts as RSS feeds instead of email messages.

For some of the major publishers, the links to set up alerts can currently be found on the following locations:
Elsevier ScienceDirect: Alert me to new Volumes / Issues near the top center of the page;
IEEE Xplore: on the "Alerts" link in the top banner on the right;
Springer (SpringerLink): In the toolbar on the left at the "Alerts" link under My Menu;
Wiley InterScience: on the Web page for an individual journal, on the Set E-Mail Alert link next to the image of the cover of the journal.