SFU Serials Costs

About Serials Cost Information at SFU Library

These files provide cost data for serials purchased by the SFU Library, broken down by departmental account.

The costs represent actual expenditures by the Library on a fiscal year basis (April-March).

In most cases, these costs represent an annual recurring cost for a serials subscription. However, inflated costs may occur when back orders are placed or multiple subscription years are paid for in a single fiscal year.

Two-year cost comparison figures are available. using the accounts of the current fiscal year. This allows for year-to-year comparisons. Account changes may be due to new subscriptions, cancellations, or shifts of subscriptions between departmental accounts.

In 1993, the Library undertook a project of providing counts of numbers of articles per year for journals costing $1000 or more annually. These were correlated with cost data to determine an estimated cost per article by Professor Robert Cameron, School of Computing Science. There are some errors in the article counts as well as the discrepancies between fiscal-year costs and recurring annual costs. Therefore high cost per article figures only indicate journal subscriptions which may deserve consideration for cancellation.

Also in 1993, the Library acquired a Local Journal Utilization Report from the Institute for Scientific Information for the purpose evaluating the journal holdings of the Library. This report consists of two files:

• journals cited by SFU authors including the total citation count per journal, and
• journals in which SFU authors have published, including the total publication count per journal.

The data cover the period 1981 through 1992 and may be found under "ISI Journal Usage Data".