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3.9. In this context of globalisation and collaboration, the UK itself sustains, as we shall see in Section 4, a world-leading position in both the productivity and the quality of its research base.
3.10. Prices and Costs. The steady growth in the volumes of research publications presents a series of challenges. Between 2006 and 2010, the global total of journal articles alone increased by a fifth, alongside much larger increases in other forms of output, especially research data. Responsibilities for disseminating, preserving and providing access to research publications—in the interests of both authors and readers—are shared between publishers, aggregators, libraries and other intermediaries; and in fulfilling those responsibilities they incur significant costs. Publishers—both commercial and not-for-profit—must seek to recoup those costs, and generate surpluses for investment, for distribution to shareholders, or for transfer to support other activities. Subscription-based journals do so in the main through their charges for licences, the largest proportion of which are met by academic and other libraries. Open access journals secure most of their revenues through article processing or publishing charges (APCs), paid by authors once an article has been accepted for publication. Some journals operate as hybrids, generating their revenues partly from subscriptions and partly from APCs for open access articles. For all categories of journal, costs and prices vary, depending critically on the number of manuscripts submitted to them, and the numbers they publish:[1] the more articles submitted, the more must be rejected and this increases the cost per article published.
3.11. Academic libraries have faced financial pressures arising from the expansion both in the numbers of staff and students they are required to serve, but also in the volumes of books and journals they are expected to provide. A seemingly-inexorable rise in expenditure on journals has put pressure on all other elements in their budgets. Most libraries have achieved significant savings by streamlining their operations, driven in part by budgetary pressures. Thus the expansion of the HE sector and of research has not been accompanied by commensurate increases in library budgets, at least in Europe and North America. In the US, for example, gross expenditure on basic research rose by over 54% in real terms between 1999 and 2009,[2] but the budgets for members of the Association of Research Libraries (representing universities where the majority of US basic and applied research is carried out) fell from over 3.5% of university expenditure in the 1980s to under 2.0% in 2009.[3] The UK experience has been similar: while library expenditure in UK universities rose in real terms between 1999 and 2009, as a proportion of total expenditure in universities, it fell from 3.3% to 2.7%.[4]
- ↑ For a discussion of the literature on the drivers of journal costs and prices, see Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarlycommunications system in the UK, RIN 2008
- ↑ National Science Board (2012), Science and Engineering Indicators 2012. National Science Foundation, Appendix Table 4-4
- ↑ http://www.arlstatistics.org/about/series/eg
- ↑ RIN, Trends in the finances of UK higher education libraries, 1999-2009, 2010
