Those affiliated with academic institutions are among the privileged few who have unfettered access to knowledge. Because of this seamless availability, many are unfamiliar with the cost of individual access.
For this activity you will attempt to determine the cost of purchasing individual access to all of the articles referenced in a recent paper you have written or read.
Begin by selecting the academic paper you want to review.
Turn your attention the list of references cited in the paper and attempt to locate copies of the articles online as if you were not affiliated with an academic institution and could not use the library as an access point.. You may need to locate these articles on publisher websites. In this case, note the cost of purchasing individual access to the article. Keep a running tally of costs you would need to pay in order to read all of the articles on the reference list you have selected.
Note that some (or all) of the articles cited may be available as open access content, either through publication in an open access journal, or archived in an online repository. So long as these copies appear to be legally posted, they do not contribute any dollar amount to the total cost.
Go Incognito
Note that even if you are not using a library website to search for articles, a publisher’s website may be able to authenticate you based on your IP Address. In order to ensure you are not inadvertently accessing the articles via your institutional subscriptions, consider using an incognito browser window.
Complete this Activity
After you complete the activity and have determined what if any cost there would be to accessing the research please share the amount along with a brief insight outlining the process of locating the articles, their availability online, and if results aligned with your exceptions going into the activity.
Image Credit: Official Receipt on White Paper by Michael Walter. Licensed under the Unsplash License
It would be an ideal world if all our articles as scholars could be published in open access journals. The prohibitive cost of publishing in these journals makes it difficult for many people to even consider this.
I took a recent article I wrote and tried to calculate the costs using a variety of book sellers (Amazon and AbeBooks) as well as journal websites. The total came out to: $976 not including tax or shipping. A full 1/3 of the books were not available at all so their costs could not be factored in. I’d say this aligned with my expectation, access to resources is one of the major benefits of academic affiliation, and this shows it.
I took the most recent article that I read and the total for its references came to $2072.72, not including taxes and shipping fees. To find the articles and monographs referenced, I would Google them to first see if they were available gratis, and if not, would see which retailer (most often journal publishers, Amazon, or Abe Books) and format was the least costly. In cases when I would be unable to find the cost of the article itself, I included the price for the monograph it belonged to. The high total cost aligned with my expectations, with the exception of monographs often costing less than individual articles.
I chose an article with a relatively short reference list–14 items–and the total came to $687.27. The article was about creating open digital badges but, despite the fact that most referenced works discussed openness in some way, only six of them were open access. For those that weren’t, I tried keeping the cost down with some ‘Google-fu’ (namely, by using boolean operators to filter for PDFs), and was therefore able to find copies of some articles and monographs that probably shouldn’t be freely available on the web. I also found that one of the books is out-of-print, and the only copy I could find was (a) grossly overpriced and (b) was in Australia, and would incur considerable shipping costs.
I chose to use the reference list from a paper I had written about a year ago. There were about 13 references, one of which I could not find, and the total came to $347.90. The majority of the references were journal articles that were quite easy to track down on the internet. Interestingly, most journal articles provide the option to purchase the individual article, which you would only have access to for a 24-48 hour period. This limited access would make it quite difficult to use the reference if you needed to come back to the article after you had read it. I did find a couple of articles that were open access, one was openly published in a Sociology journal and the other was labelled as open access in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. One of the articles I found also had a variety of options for independent researchers, including purchasing the stand-alone article (only $9 which was the cheapest one I came across), subscribing to the journal to get unlimited reading and ten downloads, or reading online to get 100 articles/month free. I found these options to be quite intriguing and this could be a potential path to creating various options to access journals, rather than charging a one-time $30-50 access fee. I find the costs of getting these articles quite outrageous, though the total cost of mine is lower in comparison to some of the examples listed above, and I can only imagine how costly this process would be if you had to purchase each article for every paper you wrote. I agree with Farah’s comment that all articles should be published in open access journals. The costs associated with both publishing and accessing these articles is extremely inaccessible for most people, even those within the academy who may not have access from their institution.
I chose my most-recent published article and the total cost was 1.200,67. The reference list is rather long and a few articles were available through Scielo (an open-access platform). I used Google Scholar to try to find an open-access version of all articles, but most of them did not have one. The total cost surprised me as I am so used to having an affiliation that I do not even take this into consideration when writing an article. It made me think of how scholars from less privileged institutions and countries that do not have the financial resources to buy access to these journals can produce knowledge if they do not have full access to the knowledge produced worldview. Knowledge seems to have “owners” who are not willing to share it. This situation reinforces exclusion and inequality on a daily basis.
I decided on one of my more major essays from my Undergrad and did the first 15 sources or so. I did the research for this project in a physical library with some actual books (remember what that was like?) so my costs were a little higher because some monographs were not digital. When I began the process it was under the assumption that I was not a student (ie: no institutional access and no student discounts) and that I would intentionally seek out the cheapest option (like eBook vs physical if possible). My total was $586 CAN and it included many different types of purchases. Many of them were purchase of the book itself (via the publisher/amazon), with one out-of-print book costing a whopping $109 CAN. The online spending came from a mixture of full subscription purchases, to partial/month-long subscriptions, to single article purchases. There were 4 “free” sources, half being open-access primary source medieval material and their translations, and the other two came from subscription free-trials being offered. So, everything was technically available, though some needed to be shipped to me from all over the world. Besides how expensive this all would be, in terms of accessibility, sometimes you do not have time to wait months for someone to send you a used copy of a book from Europe. As well, often I would be purchasing the whole book, to reference a single chapter in this essay, which would just not make sense at all. I would say the results were more expensive than I realized (although, I have never been without access through an institution in my adult life so far – so how would I have known?). In the future, I will definitely be more appreciative of my access and privilege, and work on making more things accessible through open access.
I picked the shortest article that I published, which has just 12 references. While knowing full well that journal subscriptions are expensive, I am still stunned…many of the references were $45 (US)! Just for a single article! Overall the reference list would be US$396. For a tiny research note article (and this is by getting the cheapest possible version of books, and some of the articles are available for free to download).
I decided to see how much the references would cost for a research paper that I did last year for a course. Out of 11 scholarly articles that I used. I would have to pay $237.40 to access all articles that I referenced. A surprising number of my articles actually had freely accessible versions (preprint) that reduced the overall cost for me. It took a bit of digging to find the preprint versions of some of the articles using Google to first search up the article, and then following links and searching through repositories in order to get access to non-paid for articles. The whole process and price I ended up with wasn’t actually as bad as I expected it to be, since it didn’t amount to over $300. The preprint articles really helped me save up. However, having to pay hundreds of dollars for a handful of scholarly articles, with many only giving me temporary access to the article itself is terribly expensive for me.
I selected the article I am currently working on and searched Google Scholar for open access version. None of the articles I used were available on open access and the bill for 23 articles came to over a $1000. This did not included academic books I had used.
I used the reference list from a paper I wrote for a Library and Information Studies graduate course. The total was $101.39, which was lower than I expected. However, only three were behind a paywall. I probably would not cite these sources if I had to pay for access directly. Most were available in repositories or Bronze Open Access. The Open Access trend within my list could have to do with the fact that the authors are mostly librarians.
I used a list from a recent article, with decent number of citations (about 35). Many (6) were available “openly” on one faculty member’s website, who keeps a small archive of scanned chapters and such related to the subject matter. These are “with the permission of the author”, so they may not be strictly allowed to be posted there – but this kept costs down a bit. I also referenced a number (4) of publicly available online articles. In total, these articles amount to about 965$, without tax. Any monographs I priced “used”, if available. I learned that JSTOR has an interesting “100 download/day” feature or model, which saved me about 120$. There were two books which totalled 300$ alone!! I had two monographs which I could not access at all without institutional credentials. It’s astonishing how much access is facilitated by institutional affiliation.
For this activity, I used a recent article about library materials purchasing from 2020 with the idea that more of the items would be easily accessible and possibly open access. In the name of consistency, I used the costs only from the publisher webpages rather than seeking out third party sellers.
From 15 citations, only 5 proved to be free, open, and easily accessible. Of this, a few were published in a hybrid model journal and the others posted on library association websites. The non-open items totalled about $912 USD, which was higher than I expected for only 10 items. Some of this was due to the author using such as chapters published in older print books [i.e. not available as electronic chapters], which would force the buyer to purchase the entire print book and raise the total cost.
I was somewhat surprised by the cost as a librarian myself—I expected a work written about librarianship, produced by a librarian to take more consideration in choosing open access sources.
For this activity, I chose an article I have been relying heavily on in my research that I keep coming back to over and over. The citation list is 59 items — a mix of journal articles and books. What surprised me about this activity was not just the monetary cost ($1,160) of all the items, but also the time cost in finding them (30 minutes, not including all the time it would have taken to process these transactions). I choose the cheapest option to, allowing for many articles to only be visible for 48 hours, another time cost to purchasing all the articles individually. Of all the citations, about half I could find for free. However, I wouldn’t call them all open access, as many were just previews on Google Books which maybe would do the trick, but may not be enough. There are a few questions about research value that came to my mind:
– Taylor & Francis had consistent pricing from article to article, whereas the price of an Elsevier article depended on the article in question. What is Elsevier basing as the value? What does it consider to be a pricey article, and does this perpetuate already existing hierarchies and academic inequalities?
– Some JSTOR and Springer articles were free, others cost money. Does this depend on the article or the journal? I may have to do more digging.
These inconsistencies among platforms were unexpected.
I’m responsible for assembling a bibliography for a subscription journal (I should note that bibliography itself is open access). For the entire bibliography, the cost came to: $1,024.28 Canadian before shipping and taxes. For the article section, the amount is $434 Canadian before taxes. There were a few articles that existed in hybrid journals and they were labelled as open access. While the other articles existed in journals that were entirely open access aka Gold Open Access. Another journal suggested that I sign up for DeepDyve to access the individual article. Apparently, DeepDyve is an article rental service where you can subscribe either monthly or yearly to access a certain amount of journals.For searching, I used the DOI to find the article. Then I was able to locate information about the cost of the article.
Along with the articles, the bibliography contains books and book chapters and the cost came to $590.28 before shipping and taxes. I used the IBSN to find the cost of the book. When the source is a book chapter, I searched the chapter individually to see if I can purchase it. The other two sections of the bibliography is for theses and audiovisual material. Thankfully most academic libraries in Canada allow you to access their thesis repository for free. However, when the thesis is located at an American institution, they usually cost money. There was one American thesis in my bibliography and I was unable to determine its cost. The audio visual material I used is free to access (YouTube and scholarly podcasts). As an early career librarian in an instructional role, I am not responsible for negotiating journal subscription fees. But I have started purchasing eBooks for my liaison area and I learned about how expensive they are. So I was not surprised about how much a single article can be. I haven’t heard of DeepDyve before doing activity so that was interesting.
I looked up the first 20 items (out of a total of 69) on a reference list for a recent article that I read. Of those 20, four (4) referred to online sources (freely available); one (1) additional source was a freely available online book/case report; two (2) were Open Access articles in Elsevier journals; and two (2) were articles from an open access journal. Of the eleven (11) sources you would need to buy, it seems that 3 of those are available on researchgate or on an institutional author’s website. If you have to buy them, though, the cost of buying 8 journal articles and 3 books (two ebooks and one physical book) adds up to: $285.05 USD, before taxes and before shipping. Only one of those articles would be available through JSTOR’s 100 article/month COVID plan, and that was the cheapest one (at $14). This also only accounts for less than a third of the entire reference list.
I chose an article I published a few years ago. It had 48 references, so chose to look at only 10 at random from that list:
– For the 10 I looked at, total cost was $210 USD
– Article fee range was $15-43 USD
– 2 of the 10 were open access
It was quite easy to access the articles, from the reference list there was a button to take me directly to that article and I could select “Get Access” right at the top of the article. Interestingly, some of the articles had a lower few if you wanted access for a limited time (1-2 days).
I searched the prices for the first 20 sources of a paper that had 87 citations in total. The total for the first 20 sources amounted to $1061.89. Although many of the sources counted were openly accessible, I found the books to be the source of the highest costs. For example, one book on copyright law cost $618.00, or ~59% of the total cost of sources counted! Given these prices, I can easily see how difficult it must be for those outside academia to access information at a reasonable cost.
Of the 25 or so references from an article examining the motivations of authors who publish in open access forums, eight were sources for which I would need to pay for access. In some cases, multiple pricing tiers were available, depending on whether 48 hour or 30 day access was required. The low-end estimate for the cost to read these sources was $382 USD. Assuming that 48 hours with a source would be insufficient, the higher estimate was $819 USD. Maybe this is a matter of personal preference, but, 48 hours hardly seems like enough time to read, engage with, and cite from a source were I looking to publish a related article.
It was heartening to see that an article focussing on the motivations of open accessing publishing itself drew largely on open sources. Although I did not have time to engage with all the references, it was telling that the titles of several of the paywalled articles were transparently anti-open or seemingly suspicious of open access publishing.
I took an article from immunology and discovered that none of the references could be found without an affiliation to an academic institution, with the exception of one article, which the authors had made available through ResearchGate and a book chapter, where the book could be purchased through Amazon. In total, the sum came to around $1700.80, which I cannot see as being accessible to independent researchers that are unaffiliated with institutions, or any individual trying to access this knowledge. This type of gatekeeping results in knowledge inequity.
My recent article had 19 citations and I look up how much they would all cost. While nine were freely available, the remaining ten articles would cost $345. And I feel like the cost of the articles cited in a paper is not the same as the cost to research the paper – part of the research process involves reading a number of articles that you end up not citing at all, so the cost would be even more than this.
I did my analysis out of an old course paper, just people it had a manageable reference list. The result was 917 C$. For one course paper!
What shocked me the most is that I was still trying to pay the less possible. For example, Taylor & Francis journals offer different models of ‘accesing’ their papers, and I always chose the cheapest version (accessing the article for 48 hours). So, I would have to pay almost 1000 Canadian dollars, and I will probably wont even keep most of the papers.
I did this analysis with the last undergraduate paper I wrote, and it would have costed me $224.65 USD to cite all my sources! I knew that these would be costly overall going into this activity, but I honestly had no idea that individual articles and chapters were so expensive. Granted, some of the citations were books and I may have been able to purchase single chapters with an individual researcher account, but it still wouldn’t have been much cheaper. I noticed a handful of these articles (which mostly focused on community archives and community work) were in open access journals and/or were otherwise posted for free in an institutional repository. As Kyla mentioned above, however, there were many papers I read that were not ultimately cited at all during the research process for this paper. While most articles I could find through the DOI link I put with my citation, many were cited using UBC eproxy permalinks and not the stable links from the publishers themselves. I went incognito and to publisher’s websites for these most often. I am curious how the price might vary if I allowed for other, more accessible institutional access points, like if I allowed articles and books that were accessible through the Vancouver Public Library to be counted (i.e., through the library proper and the Academic Search Ultimate).
I used one of the conference articles with the least number of citations among my works. Excluding all government websites and open access conference and journal articles the cost came to be approximately 300 dollars with each article costing 35.95 dollars. If I use the same standard for the review article I recently published and that had 200 citations it would come to be 7190 dollars!. I can’t imagine spending that much just to write one article.
Sometimes locating an open access article is time-consuming unless you find it on researchgate. Rather than use of one database such as google scholar or ubc library site that gives link directly to an article a lot of valuable time that can be spent on actually doing research is spent on searching articles.
The results did allign with what I was expecting.
My total came to $327.50 USD for a small collection of 11 citations. Tracking the articles down I found that three were offered for free through open access journals, and the rest ranged from $24-$60 for access to a single article. Echoing Kyla and Vanessa’s points above, this cost would completely limit one’s ability to conduct preliminary research or any sort of literature review in the first place.
The article I looked at came to over $500 (and that was only the ones I didn’t already have access to through my university library). Without any access, it was over $2000. It seems utterly paradoxical to me that “knowledge mobilization” is one of the key responsibilities of a scholar, but that mobilization only goes so far. It really goes to show that it is more of a meritocracy — about the line on your CV — than it is about the actual content of your ideas. This is likely true for the mast majority of articles, and the exceptions are only those who are so influential that they make their way across the paywall by other means, such as journalists.
I was happy to see that a 2013 article about open educational resources had mostly open access references – at least for the selection that I’ve consulted. Only 1 our of 20 articles would have come at a cost of USD $47.00.
This is very encouraging, since I am no longer affiliated with an academic institution and mostly rely on open access resources to support my research and decision-making in the public service.
I used an LIS article with 25 references, and the total came to about $350. About half the references were freely available, but the remaining references ranged from $20 – 70. While this amount is about what I expected, I still had a gut reaction at the expense. Seeing the number written out will make me think differently about the articles I am assigned for classes as well as my practice in my (hopefully) future career as a librarian.
For a short paper I wrote in one of my courses, I used about 5 scholarly journals. Of those 5, only one was available through open access. The total cost was then expected to be about $152.50 USD. Practically all of the articles came from the Big 5 publishers and ranged in cost from around $30 to $50 USD. I was not surprised by the cost as I had a rough idea of what it would be, but nonetheless it is hard to imagine anyone having to pay that to do research. It really gets us to think that in academia there is this long-standing tradition of how things are done, and that to get access we typically have to go through our institutions (if we are fortunate enough to be part of one) to be able to access scholarly research. It limits who and how research as an access point is determined, as well as the issues pertaining to the financial side of it through deals and packages that organizations are left to work around.
The cost of accessing the articles in the reference list I chose was around $2200. I read this article for a course. I started looking at how easily or quickly I can find/access the articles from the references list through the academic institution I am affiliated with and it was not too difficult through the library catalogue (I didn’t get all of the ones but the majority). It puts into perspective how those who do not have this same access would have to pay or find other means of obtaining the material. These are the barriers that exist with pay walled publishers.
It would cost over $400 to access the articles in the reference list I chose individually. I’m not surprised by this cost. Working in libraries has taught me how expensive these resources are. The high cost of these materials is prohibitively expensive to individual independent researchers. We talk about how troubling our current information landscape is, but at the same time make it impossibly expensive to access peer-reviewed research. People need to be affiliated with an institution in order to have access to current research. This needs to change!
I looked at a recent articles I read. The article had 58 references and of those 31 were journal articles, 13 of those of those were open access and the remaining 18 articles had a total cost of $713.00. This cost excludes the cost of books or book chapters but nevertheless, it is very expensive and I really did not expect it to be that much. But it was great to see that almost half of the articles were open access. One article can cost between $30-$50 and I can understand how this can be a barrier to both students and researchers who do not have access.
I decided to try an article that I co-authored back in 2011, thinking that some of them may have now been migrated into the “open” sections of publisher’s websites. It turns out that this was hardly ever the case. If I wanted the post-publication version of all 28 references, the cost would have been >986.50. I say greater than, because some of the references (book sections, etc) weren’t available without going to a physical library, or going through a University Library. Only ten of six were available at all through open-access repositories as pre-pubs. If I take those out, the cost goes down to >848. Stunning!
I looked back at a short ethnography assignment I wrote in undergrad. Only two of the sources I used were behind a paywall, but without institutional access those two articles alone would have cost $80.50 USD.
It’s definitely not something I would have been able to afford then or now, especially if it had been a full paper instead of just a short assignment!
I looked at a term paper that I wrote in Winter Term 2, 2019. It had a shorter bibliography than many of my other research papers, and yet, over 15 academic articles/chapters, I racked up $371.88 in purchasing fees. Of course, it’s been common practice in my experience to dig through internet archives and free library services to find some of the sources, that aren’t available through UBC. Using excerpts available through Google Scholar/Book entries, and limited time downloads for some books/papers would bring down the total cost somewhat, but usually this is only an option for books published in the 80s-early 2000s.
A recent short article I wrote contained 9 references, which includes a newspaper article and youtube video. Overall, the research would have cost $117 to complete. I consulted 5 different books through the research process, which raises an interesting topic in open access publishing as it relates to open monographs. Some presses, mainly universities, have started to investigate these options in North America, but the monograph landscape is still overwhelmingly closed. I only consulted one open access article throughout, which coincidentally was a major point of reference in my work.
For this activity, I used a relatively short non-open-access article (10 pages) that I had accessed firsthand via my institutional affiliation. It has 23 references and the research would have cost me $ 377.03. From the 23 references, only 6 were open access and those only as they were mostly from one of the few high-impact open access journals in my field. Most costs would have been related to journal article access fees for independent scholars or acquring publications from North-American university presses (prices already included some second-hand options and pdf/kindle if possible). This even would be a “less costly” article, as some of the references were from one particular edited volume.
For this activity, I used a relatively short non-open-access article (10 pages) that I had accessed firsthand via my institutional affiliation. It has 23 references and the research would have cost me $ 377.03. From the 23 references, only 6 were open access and those only as they were mostly from one of the few high-impact open access journals in my field. Most costs would have been related to journal article access fees for independent scholars or acqiuring publications from North-American university presses (prices already included some second-hand options and pdf/kindle if possible). This even would be a “less costly” article, as some of the references were from one particular edited volume.
I chose to calculate the cost for the reference list of a term paper I wrote on barroom masculinities. There were 20 items in the reference list, and the total cost came to $641.08 USD. I mostly relied on Google Scholar as a search engine to determine where the articles were hosted and what their costs were. I also located some paperbacks via Amazon, and visited CBC Gem to find their subscription costs for a documentary that I cited. Notably, if I had purchased each of these articles, $187.50 would have gone to Sage and $306 to Taylor & Francis.
I found an interesting article from a journal listed on DOAJ: https://journals.openedition.org/ijcol
The article has a total of 26 references. 3 of the preprint versions could be found on Arxiv but I only considered the publisher’s version since these were the versions actually cited in the article. I also only considered readings found legitimately posted online. 12 of the references could be found online and OA; the remaining 14 references cost a total of $2129.51 CAD to access, based on purchasing access to the online/digital versions where possible. This cost didn’t really surprise me; it would definitely be a barrier to access for many.
I calculated the cost for a paper I wrote last semester that had 16 references. 4 of the sources were OA, and 2 of them were accessible through JSTOR’s “Read Online Free” service. The cheapest possible cost for all sources was $342.15 CAD. This was based on choosing 24-48 hour (no-download) access rather than the more flexible (and expensive) purchase options. If I had opted to purchase these items rather than rent them, the total cost of my sources would have been almost twice as high.
A paper I authored had 23 references (2-3 open sourced), which costed USD$610.59.
It was actually less than I thought. I thought each article would cost around $50, maybe I remembered those instances I looked up the prices and they were so shockingly high. That said, $610 is still very high – these articles cost as much as a book, if not more.
I chose to look at a paper I recently added into my Zotero and the references listed, and the total cost came to just over USD $800. Only 3 of the 25 articles were available openly, which was less than I was expecting. Working in a library, I know first hand how expensive these resources are, and it’s extremely frustrating. It’s a huge barrier to those who might not be affiliated with an institution.
Interestingly, the amount was less than I anticipated, as many of the references were freely available.
In some cases, the level of ‘openness’ was questionable – one journal provided 2 free articles after registration only, and in another circumstance, a pdf was available through ResearchGate.
I don’t consider either to be truly open, so the cost would have been $290.72 for 2 articles in a reference list of 5, which incredibly expensive for just 2 articles.
I really liked this assignment; I may use a similar approach in an upcoming class I’m teaching to prepare students on using evidence based sources post-graduation!
I used a recent paper that I co-authored with a colleague, it is a relatively short paper with only eleven unique sources. My total came out to only $119 USD, representing two e-books and one article. Of the remaining eight sources in the reference list, two were gold/platinum OA journals, while the remaining six were published in paywalled journals where author accepted versions were made available in open access repositories. I wonder if this is due to the fact that the paper was about digital scholarship in a library science discipline, and area where researchers/practitioners tend to be aware of OA options? Anyway, this exercise definitely showed me the power of self archiving for opening up access to scholarship! This is a great assignment to illustrate the cost of access!
I chose to review the books and articles I had chosen on the first page of my research proposal references. In the 10 sources, most were books and the total to purchase an ebook of 5 of the sources was almost $500. I could purchase a copy of the older texts on Amazon, for over $150 total. The one article on the first page of my references was open-access (at least, I could access it without logging in to the UBC library). This result is not unexpected, but it is equally concerning. I also started thinking about the environmental implications of physical books, hard cover vs soft cover and the environmental benefits of open access digital journals and books.
I reviewed a reference list for an article that recently came through my library’s Reserve department. I tallied the cost of articles and did not include books. The total was only $178.50 however the reference list was extensive. The discipline was in the Humanities, which, I think, reveals the ways in which certain disciplines will have higher costs associated with their required materials. This particular reference lists used all kinds of sources: books, journal articles, CBC News articles, newspaper articles, and museum and gallery blog posts/press releases. Many of these sources were freely available online, with only five scholarly journal articles cited. All but one of those journal articles had a fee attached. I anticipate that a reference list for an article in the Sciences, from a scholarly medical journal for example, would rely far more heavily on a less diverse variety of sources and more so on scholarly articles, which means costs would be significantly higher.
I reviewed the reference list of the chosen article and realized that 13 articles cost $500+ Some but not all of the articles in the reference list are open access. Some have their pre-published version available in Researchgate but not all of them. If I am not affiliated with UBC, I don’t think I will be able to afford the cost, especially those articles which are not open access and pre-published versions are not available.
I was quite surprised at the costs of the bibliography of articles that I had used in my published piece. 11 of the 20 references are behind a paywall. There was a handful that might be considered open access as pre-print copies. Just like some of the colleagues here in this course that have mentioned, if I were not affiliated with my institution UBC, I would not be able to access these articles and therefore, would not probably include them in my research.
As I examined the list of paywalled pieces, I do notice some patterns. I found that publishers do seem to charge the same prices for articles, and not base prices on the length or “popularity” of the article. I can imagine that one day some publishers might deploy “tiered pricing” as they do at sporting events or concerts.
I chose an article that I previously located for a student’s project:
Martin, C., & MacDonald, B. H. (2020). Using interpersonal communication strategies to encourage science conversations on social media. PloS One, 15(11), e0241972–e0241972. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241972
I attempted to locate the references using Google search on a web browser in incognito mode.
If the student did not have access to the library’s databases, I’m estimating it would have cost them $4065 CDN to read the references — I say estimating because many of the publishers had pricing listed in US dollars and it was unclear how VAT and conversion to Canadian dollars would occur. While that cost was substantial, the search highlighted other issues.
Out of 126 references:
– 50 sources were open access/accessible via the web (not surprising, as the research topic lent itself to public policy information)
– 68 sources were a one-time payment to purchase a print book or download a PDF of the article
– 5 sources were only available via an annual subscription to the journal or membership to an association (cost not included above)
– 1 print source was out of print and could not be purchased
– 1 source was a website that was not available
– 1 source was an article that only had a pay-per-view model to “rent” the article for 30 days
This just shows that even with a large budget, the average user still couldn’t purchase all of the resources needed to truly interact with the original research article. In some cases, publishers have put in place barriers limiting access to organizations who can afford annual fees.
I looked at the list on my Library Course Reserves list for a class that I teach:
If I added this up correctly, then 39 out of 50 resources would not be available without UBC library access. This includes access to 15 chapters from a variety of ebooks available through the library. Those ebooks run between $50 and $150 a piece.
There are also 16 articles from academic journals. For example, one article costs $12 for 48hrs access and $45 for downloading. A couple were available from ERIC: https://eric.ed.gov/?.
Not only was the cost exorbitant but so was the slog of trying to find alternatives!
I analyzed the references of a paper I recently wrote. I was not able to locate 7 references online out of 39. The cost of these would be $307 USD, which is cheaper than what other colleagues have found. However, most of the paywall sources are highly cited articles and books, with at least 350 citations on Google Scholar, so it is concerning that these popular papers are not open access, given their influence on my discipline (political communication).
I chose a paper I’ve written for one of my courses, and the cost of the reference list turned out to be 1033 USD, although some sources were available through institutional repositories or were open access in the first place. What struck me as well was the inconsistency of price and access across the list. Sometimes an article would cost more than a new book, sometimes the same chapter would cost differently across publishers. Sometimes a book would be available for rent on Amazon Kindle for a very low price, other times the difference between a used third and fourth editions would be in the hundreds of dollars. Sometimes the fee gave you access to a 48-hour window to download a PDF, other times it was 24 hours for only online reading. The time and labor that would go into searching for the references in their variety of options adds a significant amount to the cost of the references themselves.
I looked at the references from a recent “short report” that I had published which included 19 references. When creating the reference list, I was not thinking about open access at all so was pleasantly surprised that 10 of the references in my list were freely available. For the rest, one was a conference abstract and therefore not available unless you became a member of the associated society (which I think costs ~$300/year). The other articles cost ~$378 CND ranging in price from $15-75. This exercise has definitely opened my eyes to the price of references which I had never thought of before. In the future, I’ll likely take a closer look at which articles I reference and, if I have a choice, I will opt for a freely available one.
I chose a paper I recently read for a course titled “Progressive and Radical Information Work”, an OA article titled ” ‘Information Has Value’: The Political Economy of Information Capitalism” (an ironic subject matter!). The article has 42 references in total. Author Ellenwood draws from a variety of sources, including blog posts and podcasts, and includes mostly articles from OA journals like Progressive Librarian and Journal of Critical Librarianship- however, there are several books referenced in the list which I could not find available OA. I tried to find the cheapest versions available from publisher websites for these titles, but the total still came close to $1000- $946.33. In addition to the exorbitant cost, the time spent finding and evaluating purchase options for these sources added up!
I selected a book chapter from a 2003 book and most of the references were not available on OA or in electronic format. I only found two articles in OA journals, the rest were all books, three of the books I was not able to find a price for, and one was in rupees (which when converted to $ CAD turned out to be $0.90 – but, who knows what the shipping may have been). The total cost of the references I could find was $1,730 CAD not including tax or shipping costs (FOR ONE CHAPTER). I was surprised that one of the articles had a price tag of $47 USD (just for that article).
This does not surprise me, even though I was not expecting such a high price. I am from Latin America and I always knew how expensive is for researchers to access the books/resources they need. Frequently, the libraries they are affiliated with, do not have the funding to subscribe to many journals or purchase books. It really means a lot being part of an institution like UBC with such a broad access in all fields. This really explains what research inequality is, when you are able to see firsthand the different in access that the researchers from the Global South have compared to those of the North. Open Access seems to be a good response to inequality when you first starts researching it, but the more I learn about it, the more complicated it is and all these inequality issues do not seem to disappear. But I think there is much to be gain from Open Access. I am hopefull
I selected an article from some assigned reading for coursework. Despite having under 20 references, the total for paid access to all of the resources was over $1000CAD. As many before me have already noted, the access provided by being affiliated with an institution is a massive advantage. Prior to this exercise, I was naive about the prices of ISO standards. One reference was a specific ISO standard, listed at 118CHF (Currently ~$259.69CAD).
I chose the article that is up next in my reading list.
I determined it would cost me $125.40 to access all of the content.
I opened up google scholar to find each of the articles and books.
Many of the articles cited were open access, I was no surprised by this as know that the scholar of the article likely made this as a conscious decision as they are very dedicated to OA scholarship — yet it is impossible for their works cited list to completely “free”.
To calculate the total cost of the cited works — I chose the cheapest option.
Some articles provided multiple options for accessing the paper. For instance: one paper offered: $10 for 48 hour access, $18 for online only access, $48 for PDF access. Another only offered access via subscription: $19.50 / month OR $199/ year.
$125.40 is a lot of money to access research materials from one research article, but I know from seeing others posting on this board + my own experience in seeing how most research is behind paywall — this is a nominal fee in comparison to most.
I took a look at a paper I recently helped a student find. I used Google Scholar as a search engine. In the end, I was able to track down 9 of the 14 references listed. The cost would add up to 789CAD. Of the ones I found, half of them were gold OA journals and the others were published behind paywalled journals (with versions deposited in open access repositories). I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it was an eye opening exercise. It reminded me of how privileged I am to have access to “free” knowledge through my institution’s library subscriptions.
I looked up the references for Moldoveanu B, Gearhart AM, Jalil BA, Saad M, Guardiola JJ. Pulmonary Aspergillosis: Spectrum of Disease. Am J Med Sci. 2021 Apr;361(4):411-419. doi: 10.1016/j.amjms.2020.12.009. Epub 2020 Dec 13. PMID: 33563417.
The initial article was $27.95 from Elsevier but the references were free.
Then I looked up https://www.resmedjournal.com/article/S0954-6111(18)30227-0/fulltext and it and it’s references were all free on Google Scholar.
I was slightly surprised with the result because it was less than 50 CAD! However, I believe that happened because the authors shared most papers on Research Gate. If not the cost would be more than 2000 CAD!!!!
I picked a research paper in the field of health as I am currently studying health and nutrition. Looking at the reference list and limiting it to 10 references, the cost was around $160 for the research paper. Then the paper itself was around $40 for access and this brings the price up to $200, not counting the other references. Some references for the paper I could access fully online, but others required payment so the price would grow past $200. Only being able to access some articles fully online is limiting to people who are unable to afford it and therefore it does not provide the whole picture of references used for the research paper for those wanting to know.
I am fortunate enough to work for a university with a fairly good access to various databases and journals. So, I never really stop to think how much a resource will cost me. It still shocks me when I look up my own articles and see how much the journal is making “off of my work” if someone needs to download it. I took my latest manuscript with over 30 references and noticed 90% are not open access sources that I selected, because, as I said, I dont often think about access to articles I can get them through my institution. The total cost for my reference list came at over 835$. To think that some researchers, especially in third world countries, who might not have the same database access I do need to pay this much to do their work really puts things into perspective and makes me wonder about sources of knowledge, knowledge production, and views.
I used one of my students’ articles which was the result of a directed study course with only 8 references. Fortunately all of these references were freely available for my student due to their access to the library database. The amount of money that someone out of our institution had to pay for accessing these references was about $121 (two of them only give temporary access). This much money although not very significant for students in developed countries, can be a major challenge for other students in under developed countries which can potentially limit the quality of their researches / projects.
For this activity, I chose to review the references for a recent coursework assignment I completed (a topic briefing around Indigenous knowledge and collections intended for a non-academic audience). Due to the nature and audience of the paper, I cited a large number of sources that were freely available online (such as websites of local First Nations). The cost of purchasing individual access to the seven other sources came to $415. Comparing this total to that of my peers, it seems be in the middle-ground in terms of pricing. That being said, the cost is very likely to be exorbitant and major barrier to access for audiences (such as small nonprofits, individuals, and First Nations) without formalized agreements or partnerships to ensure access to content. I primarily used Google Scholar to attempt to locate freely-available versions of articles.
Some interesting findings:
1. About half of the Indigenous-authored academic articles were published by one of the ‘big five’ while also being freely-available through the university repositories affiliated with their authors, such as cIRcle at UBC; this was a higher proportion than non-Indigenous-authored articles. This finding also informed my search strategy, which I refined by searching for articles within potentially-relevant repositories based on author affiliations.
2. One article was freely available as full-text on SAGE, which I found quite surprising! This made me curious about what went into making this publishing option possible behind the scenes (author-publisher negotiations?), since it seems counter to SAGE’s business model/financial interests.
3. Lastly, the most expensive article (at $140) was a journal volume from the International Federation of Library Associations on Indigenous Notions of Ownership and Libraries, Archives and Museums. This is an incredibly relevant and important topic for Indigenous communities as it relates to the inherent right of Indigenous sovereignty. I found it especially painful (though not surprising) that Indigenous communities would not be able to access this content (which may directly relate to their Nations and struggles) if they were unable to pay this non-Indigenous-led publisher.
I looked at a recent article on the ultrastructural analysis of a fungal pathogen for this activity. Out of 51 references, surprisingly, 41 articles were open access! This was unexpected because I anticipated more of these articles to be locked behind a paywall. The total cost of my reference list was $401.80. The list of paid articles includes papers that I frequently refer to in my research! All the articles cited in the paper I analyzed were easily available online. I used PubMed to find full-text links, which led me to the appropriate publisher websites.
I used a recent article I read for this and was pleasantly surprised to find that every cited resource was available without charge! One of the co-authors of the article makes an effort to publish their work under open access and, where needed, will post copies of their publications on their personal website or in an institutional repository. It was fantastic to see that they extend their commitment to openly accessible research to also using and supporting other authors who are publishing under open access terms. A couple of the resources the cited were academic books that had free ePub versions available, but could also be purchased as either eBooks or physical books. The cost of these books ranged quite a bit from $17 for one to $250 for another (hardcopy version).
I reviewed the references in a paper that my colleagues and I have queued in a journal waiting to be published. Excluding the six books cited, there were just under 40 references, split between free and paid, with paid mostly coming from two journals. This came out just under $1000 Canadian and chose to go to the publisher sites to check access so some may have been free through other places. This count also doesn’t include the numerous articles reviewed that did not get cited so the cost will likely have been higher. And top it off, we selected a non-open access journal to publish in! Again for many of the reasons listed throughout the module – a higher prestige journal. On a side note, a colleague just recently discovered a fourth year psychology student that had been paying for articles for 3.5 years!
Cost and access is definitely a barrier for researchers and students, especially those that do not have ready access to the databases provided by libraries.
This was a very interesting exercise to complete because I am currently precariously employed at my work and I don’t actually have institutional access to an academic library or e-resources at this moment.
I chose to analyze this paper (https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/895064/hidden-and-forbidden-conceptualising-dark-knowledge), an LIS paper by Annemaree Lloyd and Simon Burnett on illicit and dark knowledge from the Journal of Documentation in 2020 (https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JD-12-2019-0234/full/html).
Overall, the reference list for this paper is comprised of 27 “non-open” resources (paywalled journal articles, non-open monographs) and 33 “open” resources (though that 33 count does include 3 monographs (2 Foucault and 1 Polanyi) posted as PDFs to Monoskop.org, which I’m guessing would likely not actually be considered truly “open” for the purposes of this exercise, so it is probably more like 30 and 30). I was actually surprised at how much I could find openly posted online, particularly on ResearchGate and through institutional repositories.
The cost of the 27 “non-open” resources came to: $941.15 (USD) and $523.03 CAD. Using the exchange rate online today, that would be $1805.02 CAD total – just completely unfeasible for an independent/private researcher! Many of the paywalled articles that comprise that list of “non-open” resources were also, it needs to be emphasized, not even full ownership of the resources, but rather 24 or 48 hour rentals, VitalSource, etc.
My most expensive resource was this title (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-1557-2), a Springer book.
I have done some previous scholarly work on phenomena like shadow libraries and Sci-Hub, and, to me, this exercise really drove home why those sites have been created. Bracketing the ethics of those sites existing, on purely materialist terms they exist to lower massive financial barriers to scholarly knowledge, particularly in the Global South.
I chose the works cited page for an article about to be published in an open access journal issue I have been editing. I know the author is a PhD candidate, and relies upon their university to provide them with access to journals and books for their research. The total cost for the 24 citations was $583.49, not counting an open-access article, a couple of out-of-print books, and–most surprisingly to me–a couple of citations from a journal that appears to be available exclusively through institutional subscriptions, with no option to pay to view a specific article. Shipping costs and conversion between USD and CAD for some references are also not included in this figure, so the real total would be even higher. This figure is not extremely surprising to me, and only serves to remind me of how impossible it is to conduct thorough research without institutional support.
I chose references that I wanted to purchase a few years ago, and the total cost came to $1111.41 CAD, excluding shipping fees. Japan is known for its archives being challenging to access and for the lack of digitized resources. Consequently, it’s not unusual to incur such expenses for journals, particularly for out-of-print materials.
I chose the final paper that I wrote for the course in the last term. There are 9 references on my citation list. I believe the total cost is approximately $450. However, some books that I used for my paper were published in Japan. As Lilian mentioned, Japan is known for the lack of digitization of resources. Therefore, some of the material that I used needed to include a shipment fee if I needed to buy printed texts.