Elsevier has made public a letter to librarians stating that it is targeting "a global average list price increase of not more than six percent" for its journals in 2009. It notes that "the 2008 average list price increase across all STM publishers was 8.70% in Europe and 10.10% in the U.S."
Elsevier is taking author publication fees into account for pricing a subset of its journals: "For individual journals, we are realigning prices to reflect a number of factors, including differences in the number of articles made available, quality, and usage, as well as new factors such as Sponsored Articles." (The Sponsored Articles program allows authors publishing articles in over 40 journals to pay a $3,000 fee to make them open access.)
The letter also states that there were over 386 million articles downloaded from ScienceDirect in 2007, with over 460 million downloaded articles being anticipated in 2008.
I find it fascinating that their average increase will be 6% – all of the journals covered by my fund have gone up by a cool 25%! I’d like to know who the lucky souls are getting the other end of the deal. Atmospheric Environment has gone up to £5.2k, and we’re not allowed to cancel it as we’re tied into the Science Direct deal. No books for us…