Designing the Future of Electronic Journals With Lessons Learned From the Past: Economic and Use Patterns of Scientific Journals

Studies of thousands of both university and non-university scientists demonstrate the importance of scholarly journals to their work. Amount of reading has remained high and scientists who read more, are more successful. Readings have shifted from personal subscriptions to more readings from library provided journals. Personal subscriptions have gone down from 5.8 subscriptions per scientist in 1977 to about 2.9 subscriptions. The drop is due to the rising prices of subscriptions, prices that have increased beyond inflation rates. Processing costs decrease some with electronic journals, but the high fixed costs associated with creating scholarly journals are the same for print or for electronic. The costs associated with some value added features of electronic journals are high.