JVP: Description
Journal Valuation Project and Database.
The UW Madison Libraries is currently engaged in a project designed to update, extend and consolidate its previous efforts at measuring the cost-effectiveness of journals that date back to the pioneering work of Prof. Heinz Barschall in the late 1980's. Barschall's work focused primarily on physics journals. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Barschall's work in 1998, UW Madison Libraries updated the physics study and also completed studies of economics and neural science journals. In 2000 the UW Chemistry Library contributed a study of the journals in that collection. The preceding studies essentially applied the methodology developed by Prof. Barschall (cost per 1000 characters related to ISI Impact Factors). In addition to these efforts, since 1995 campus selectors have had access to annual print journal use statistics (formerly titled "Journal Cost Benefit Reports" produced by Wendt Engineering Library). These reports correlate subscription cost with local print copy use data.
The goal of the new project, Journal Value Project (JVP), is to develop a single, user-friendly database that will collect journal cost and valuation data for all areas of the sciences. The current JVP database includes data for 2001 (3000 titles) and 2004 (2500 titles from the 2001 list for which the UW Madison still maintained a subscription in 2004). Journals in the humanities and social sciences may be added in the future. We will consider offers to collaborate with other universities so that we may include journals not subscribed to by the UW.
We believe that the new database will serve the same twofold purpose as previous studies: For one, the cost and valuation data should prove very valuable to librarians as they make annual decisions as to which journals to cancel or retain. That has certainly been the case on this campus in those areas where data has been available, and activity at the web sites where JCB Reports and Barschall studies are accessible suggests a much broader impact. Secondly, we hope that by placing this kind of data at the fingertips of faculty and other users of the scholarly literature we will increase awareness of the crisis in scholarly communication that has been driven by an upward price spiral affecting in particular for-profit journals in science, technology and medicine. The crisis has been a grim fact of life in research libraries for several decades. We believe that it will only be resolved when those who read, write, review and edit the literature - the scientists and scholars themselves - recognize the key role they must play in seeking change.
For more about the work of Prof. Heinz Barschall, see http://barschall.stanford.edu/.
Project Managers: Travis Warwick (T.W.), Math Library, & Emily Wixson (E.W.), Chemistry Library
Acknowledgements
T.W, and E.W. acknowledge the following individuals for their contributions to this project: Ken Frazier, Director of General Library System, for funding the current iteration of the project; Thomas Murray, former director of Wendt Engineering Library, for his unfailing support and guidance of the project; Nathan Vack and Eric Larson, Wendt Library technical support, for their ability to translate user needs into programming realities; Ken Rouse, former director of Chemistry Library, for his commitment to journal valuation and the Barschall method; and our student assistants John Chung, Kara McGurk, and Scott Pellicane, for their tireless collection of data.
Additionally we acknowledge The Thompson Corporation for the use of ISI Journal Citation Report data.