Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Per Article Charges?

As a follow up to Chuck's previous post on open access publications, I compiled a table of per article charges from a selection of more-or-less ancient-world related journals. You should be able to follow the links to pages that document this information. But if you get through to the article, that may be because you're coming from a subscribed IP range. If no source is given, the link is to the JSTOR version. The '(*)' on the second row indicates that I didn't see the price for an AJA article from Atypon, but I think $10.00 is right.

JournalArticle Price (USD)
American Journal of Archaeology (JSTOR)10.00
American Journal of Archaeology (Atypon)10.00 (*)
American Journal of Philology10.00
Archaeometry (Blackwell)29.00
Britannia12.00
Classical JournalNA
Classical Philology14.00
Classical Quarterly19.00
Classical Review19.00
Greece & Rome19.00
Harvard Studies in Classical PhilologyNA
Hesperia (JSTOR)12.00
Hesperia (Atypon)10.00
Internaional Journal of Nautical Archaeology (Blackwell)29.00
Journal of Hellenic Studies12.00
Journal of Roman Studies12.00
Phoenix10.00
Transactions of the American Philological AssociationNA
Dumbarton Oaks PapersNA
Oxford Journal of Archaeology (Blackwell)29.00
Harvard Theological Review (Cambridge)15.00
Cambridge Archaeological Journal (Cambridge)15.00

Many people will know that I am not inclined to charge for the distribution of information, but I don't want to beat that (very much alive) horse right now. I do wonder if anybody from a journal, Atypon or JSTOR would be willing to dramatically drop these prices, at least on an experimental basis. How about 50 cents per article? It seems to me that the price/demand curve might work in everybody's favor. Many more copies would be sold, people like me couldn't complain nearly so much. I'm guessing that the answer is bound up in the perceived necessity to maintain a printed version but a small test of micro-payment supported digital distribution might be interesting.

3 comments:

david meadows said...

FWIW, i rail about this same thing constantly, but I would happily pay a dollar for an article as a pdf (i.e. about the same you'd pay for something at itunes). even better, if they accepted paypal i'd be a very happy independent scholar. even mo' better, if they had an affiliate program which gave me points for recommending articles that others might download, i'd be ecstatic.

Dorothy King said...

I seem to vary between having JSTOR access and being cut off ... so would happily join too - think this has been discussed many places before.

But, I wanted to point out one of the good things Bush has done ... he made a move where scientific studies partly funded by the government (ie us US tax payers) had to be freely available. It's just starting to be implemented, and seems to mostly apply to medical journals (who are in fits over this as journals are big business), but should also in theory apply to all research, including for example, archaeologists who get an NEH grant and publish in the AJA ...

Charles Watkinson said...

Many libraries use document delivery services to avoid supporting journals through subscriptions. Making individual articles available at micropayment levels would tempt even more librarians to use this method of accessing the literature, and further undermine subscription revenue. Why shouldn't an organization like the American School of Classical Studies, that funds a lot of the research it publishes, be entitled to charge something for re-use? And isn't a targeted source of information, like an article, worth $10-$12?