by Doug Rocks-Macqueen

Over the last several decades there has been a marked increase in both open access and commercial publisher journals in archaeology (Figure 1). This is an interesting phenomenon as these journals are on the opposite sides of the publishing spectrum. Open access journals give away access to their contents for free while commercial publishers charge for that same access. There is some cross over between these models with some open access journals providing free access to readers but ask that the author of an article bares the finical cost of publishing. Though, there are very few journals like this, such as Antiqua launched by PAGEPress in the spring of 2011. Furthermore, some commercial publishers offer an author pays option for individual article in their journals but for the most part commercial publishers charge everyone for access to their journal content. While open access journals provide the service for free, usually without charging anyone.

Figure 1: Number of Archaeology Journals published each year by publishing type. These types reflect the current make up of a journal e.g. why a journal that was first published in 1940 is marked as open access when the internet was not yet invented.

This growth raises an interesting question. If one could receive journal content for free then why would universities and archaeologists continue to pay for journal access from commercial publishers? The common justification put forth by commercial publishers is that their publication process “adds value to the research it publishes” (House of Commons: 2004 p.38) and thus what the consumer is paying for is quality. Print versus digital publishing does not play a factor in prices as they both cost roughly the same (Galyani-Moghaddam: 2009). It is why most publishers charge the same price for either digital or print versions of their journals. In archaeology no one, as of yet, has tested this assertion that the quality of journals is tied to prices by actually comparing these respected aspects of archaeology journals against each other.

This brief article will attempt just that, to test journal quality against price. There are two ways that this could be done; one is through the use of citation analysis. This works by measuring the number of citations for each individual article within a journal and then averaging that count. The assumption is that important research is cited more often than sub-par research and higher quality journals will contain higher quality research and thus have higher citation rates (Thomson-Reuters: 2011). The other approach is a qualitative ranking of journals by a panel of academics to rank the quality of the journals. The results of these approaches are a qualitative and quantitative ranking of journal quality which in turn can be compared against the prices of journals.
To test citation rates the number of citations were taken off a list of over 250 archaeology journals, 189 were non-open access, and compared against their prices. The citations were gathered from the Publish or Perish software (Harzing: 2007) that uses Google Scholar as a database. Google Scholar is more comprehensive in its coverage of journals then other databases and includes book citations (Harzing: 2007). Prices of journals were then taken from the advertised rate of journals on their respected websites. In the case of journals that could only be accessed as part of a society membership the cost of that membership was used as a proxy for journal prices. The results (Figure 2) show that there is no correlation (high positive R2 numbers) between citation rates of research and prices of journals. It should be noted the results are the same for non-commercial publishers, such as archaeology societies, too.

Figure 2: Average citation per article against journal price.

For a qualitative view the ranking of archaeology journals were taken from the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) rankings of journals (Australia: 2011). These rankings are compiled by a group of academics in the field. This was a slightly smaller data set, 91, as the ERA ranking does not cover that many journals. Again taking price against the rankings we see that there is no correlation between price and quality of journals.

Figure 3: ERA scores (converted to numbers: A* = 4, A = 3, B = 2, and C = 1.) against price of journals.
It could be said that the situation is more complicated as many universities obtaining journals through bulk deals with publishers or through consortiums that lower the price. The information on those prices is usually confidential so it is unknown how much universities pay for these journals. Yet, this would probably have very little bearing on the results shown above. Lower prices benefit archaeologists but a 20%, 30% or % 50 reductions in price across a publishers catalog would not change the imbalances unless those reductions were specifically targeted at certain journals. As of yet, no consortium works in this way which means even with lower prices there is still no correlation between price and quality.
The argument could also be made that a journal could contain an article that is vital to a person’s research and that there is no way to measure the quality of such an article. Furthermore, it could be argued that no one could put a price on something like that. This is a stray man fallacy as most universities do not subscribe to every archaeology journal anyways (Table 1) so research will be missed regardless of the price of journals. In a discipline with limited resources such as archaeology a price can be put on most everything and the only sticking point is the actual price.

What do these results mean for archaeology? There are two ways to address these findings; one is to change the measurements of quality. By exploring other avenues to measure quality it might be possible to find one that correlates with prices. The other option is to reevaluate why we pay such high prices for commercial journals when there is no link between price and quality. This is especially true in light of the large increase in open access archaeology journals. Each archaeologist will have to ask themselves, why pay such high prices for no improvement in quality?

References

Australia, 2010 The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). vol. 2011. http://www.arc.gov.au/era/ Accessed 2/2/2011.

Galyani-Moghaddam, G. 2009 Why Are Scholarly Journals Costly even with Electronic Publishing? In Interlending & Document Supply. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. pp.149-155.

Harzing, A.W. 2007 Publish or Perish, available from http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm

House of Commons Science and Technology Committes 2004 Scientific Publications: Free for All Published on 20 July 2004 by authority of the House of Commons, London: The Stationery Office Limited

Thomson-Reuters 2011 The Thomson Reuters Impact Factor. vol. 2011. http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/free/essays/impact_factor/ Accessed 2/2/2011.

Doug Rocks-Macqueen is a PhD Candidate University of Edinburgh