A look at 65 years of serials inflation offers context, but no predictions as to what coming years may hold

Since 1960, Library Journal has published an annual article covering the ups and downs of periodicals pricing. While much has changed in libraries over those years, the report continues to remain relevant, providing librarians with a sense of whether their collections budget in the coming year can be adequately expected to cover predicted increases in periodicals pricing. The article, however, is not just about numbers. It also touches on new and emerging pricing and sales models, discusses trends in the serials marketplace, and considers the issues collections librarians deal with when working with a finite budget. This year, we cast both a look back to see what can be learned from the past, and a look forward to consider what might be heading our way in the coming years.

LOOKING BACK

In 1955, William Kurth, assistant chief of the Library of Congress Order Division, wrote: “Recent years have witnessed sharp and alarming increases in the prices of…periodicals issued throughout the world.... This trend in prices is severe, increasingly damaging to the development of the library’s...collections, and disruptive of the planning of meaningful budgetary requests.”

Perhaps most striking is how long the ogre of materials inflation has struck at the hearts of librarians. By the early 1950s, concerns about materials inflation, coupled with the proliferation of new periodical titles, were high enough that Kurth proposed developing a cost of books and cost of periodicals index that could be widely applicable to libraries across the country. When the American Library Association’s newly formed Resources & Technical Services Section was established in 1955, it almost immediately, under Kurth’s direction, set up a Committee on Costs of Library Materials Index. In 1960, the Committee published the first U.S. Periodicals Price Index (USPPI). Consisting of just three subject areas (Political Science, Agriculture, and Children’s Literature), the index was compiled using a sampling procedure established by Helen Welch Tuttle, then a librarian at the University of Illinois. Prices for the sample title list were pulled from business records of the library acquisitions department, publisher price lists, and subscription agent catalogs. The Committee simultaneously began publishing a books price index, as well as a price index focused on serials indexes.

By 1964, the Periodicals Price Index was being compiled from a sample list of 2,246 titles, covering 24 subject areas. While the average price of a periodical title that year was $6.92, science materials had already established themselves as the most expensive, with Chemistry and Physics, Medicine, and Psychology titles jostling for first place. That year, the authors noted, “These comparisons point up the far greater increase in prices for printed materials compared with the increase in the general category of consumer prices.” Two years later, the article noted that while periodical prices increased by 7 percent, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased by just 1.9 percent. Again, the authors remarked, “Librarians cannot emphasize too strongly the much greater increase in the price of library materials than in general consumer prices.” Titles in Science, Technology, and Medicine disciplines were not only the most expensive, but also increasing in price at a faster rate than titles in other subject disciplines.

Norman Brown took over as compiler from Welch in 1972, and in doing so, was witness to a decade of double-digit inflation. The following year saw periodicals in the index increase on average by 22 percent, while the average price jumped from $13.23 to $16.20. Between 1977 and 1984, annual price increases had averaged 12.2 percent, causing Brown and Jane Phillips (who joined as co-compiler in 1979) to note that 1984 had finally brought positive news: The annual inflation rate had declined to 9.4 percent, with the average title price now $54.97.

In 1985, titles in the Chemistry and Physics subject area continued to hold the honor of the average highest priced title ($238.43). Judith Horn and Rebecca Lenzini, both of the Faxon Company, took over as compilers, with Faxon now supplying the subscription price information. With the supply of pricing information now automated, rather than manually compiled, the publication month of the Periodicals Price Index was moved from July to April to increase its usefulness for annual budgeting purposes. Serials inflation this year dropped to 8.6 percent. Still, Horn and Renzini noted, “Despite this...trend of lower percentage increases, the USPPI is increasing at a far faster rate than the Consumer Price Index.” This was clearly evident in 1986, when the USPPI increase was 8.9 percent, compared to the CPI increase of 1.9 percent. By the early 1990s, inflation was back up into the double digits yet again.

Change was afoot in 1993, as the USPPI, now authored by Kathryn Hammell Carpenter and Adrian W. Alexander, both at Faxon, moved from Library Journal to American Libraries, with pricing still supplied by Faxon. Today, that index is created from a sample list of 7,400 titles and is published as “Prices of U.S. and Foreign Published Materials” in the Library & Book Trade Almanac.

Library Journal opted to continue with an annual periodicals pricing article, resulting in the Periodicals Price Survey, authored by Lee Ketcham from the University of Montevallo and Kathleen Born from EBSCO, using pricing information supplied by EBSCO. However, while the USPPI pulled from a controlled and consistent title set to determine average pricing inflation year over year, the Periodicals Price Survey instead pulled data from several sources to measure and predict broad price changes in the marketplace. The new article offered additional budget insights for librarians by providing cost histories, factoring in currency fluctuations, projecting price increases for the coming renewal season, and highlighting trends and issues playing a role in periodicals pricing and the library materials marketplace. What had not changed by 1993 was which subject disciplines had the highest priced titles: Chemistry and Physics remained on top, with average prices of $1,042 and $1,090, respectively. By comparison, the average price for a History title was $74.16.

Although the mid-1990s saw the periodicals inflation rate ease to single digit increases, the appearance of electronic journals did not appear to offer librarians much hope that the new format would result in lower pricing. In the 1997 article Ketchum and Born commented, “Early indicators [of e-journals] give little hope of lower prices and cheaper access,” while a year later, they noted, “The effect of the [electronic revolution] on the periodicals market is hard to determine, with one exception: Costs to libraries are going up, not down.”

By 2000, many libraries were opting into bundles or big deals, as some publishers began requiring a bundle purchase to access a single electronic title. To protect from inflation increases, many libraries were also favoring multiyear contracts. Increasingly, European publishers were pricing in U.S. dollars, which at least removed currency fluctuations from budget considerations. Shrinking publisher discounts, pushes by publishers for direct invoicing, and consortia deals began to threaten the stability of subscription agencies. Pushback from customers meant that publishers began to allow Big Deals to be invoiced through an agent.

While the 2000s saw prices begin to stabilize in the 7–9 percent range, librarians were growing increasingly concerned about mergers, monopolies, and publisher profit margins. Average journal prices more than doubled over that decade: In 2001, the average price of a Physics title was $2,011; Chemistry, $1,918; History, $120. By 2010, Chemistry was now in the top spot ($3,792) followed closely by Physics ($3,368). The average cost of a History title that year: $295.

More libraries began to consider whether it was time to uncouple from Big Deals and database models of journal ownership. The concept of open access (OA) began to take hold, as both librarians and scholars recognized that the existing system of paywalls seriously limited access to information. BioMed Central, PLoS, and Project Euclid all came into being at this time, and more journals began offering hybrid OA. By 2008, governments and public funding agencies in the United States and Europe had begun to mandate OA to grantees’ peer-reviewed research, albeit with an embargo period in some cases.

That same year, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences became the first of many institutions to adopt an OA publishing policy for scholarly articles written by Harvard researchers. With the writing on the wall, publishers, originally very resistant to OA (at least as a business model), now began to embrace it; with its 2008 takeover of BioMed Central, Springer became the world’s largest OA publisher, a position it holds to this day.

In 2010, Stephen Bosch of the University of Arizona and Kittie Henderson of EBSCO took over as authors of the survey. Periodical price increases, now in the 5–7 percent range, provided some relief to libraries battling funding cuts resulting from the 2008 Great Recession; however, those price increases still continued to exceed average CPI inflation rates of 2–4 percent. By the mid 2010s, the authors noted that two trends had become entrenched: First, although libraries had begun to recover somewhat from funding cuts necessitated by the recession, they continued to battle the terrible twins of revenue stagnation and serials inflation; second, OA had not been the disruptive force on commercial publishing that many had hoped for. By the end of the decade, commercial publishers had become the largest producers of OA content, with no indication that OA publishing would either reduce expenditures for libraries or change the way commercial publishers dominated the market. In 2019, the average price for a Chemistry title in the Clarivate Indexes was $5,950; Physics, $5,089; History, $518.

By 2020, libraries that had only just begun to adjust to a new normal of budget cuts necessitated by the Great Recession were now facing New Normal 2.0 as the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled how libraries provided access to services and collections. The decision by publishers to limit price increases coupled with federal stimulus funding buffered the budgets of many libraries. And despite several subsequent years of social and political unrest, continuing supply chain issues, and high inflation rates, the U.S. economy remained strong and unemployment low. Still, even a global pandemic did not disrupt the Chemistry and Physics subject disciplines from enjoying their long reign with the highest average prices; for 2025, Chemistry clocked in at $8,572, Physics at $6,924, while their humanities cousin History trailed behind at $778.

OUTCOME UNCERTAIN

For most of this article’s history, the serials marketplace was relatively predictable: periodicals were purchased on a subscription basis and prices would increase each year. Librarians might need to add, drop, or bundle titles or adjust monograph spending to ensure that serials expenditures were within budget, but the method by which libraries purchased and provided access to periodicals in 2015 was still not dramatically different than it was in 1960. Today, the marketplace has shifted to where Kurth and Welch might well struggle to understand it, as OA publishing, read and publish (R&P) agreements, article processing charges, and alternative access mechanisms like Article Galaxy Scholar have taken hold. While the idea of OA as a public good remains largely accepted, the economics of OA as an affordable reality remains uncertain. Also remaining unclear is at what point a sales model that encourages quantity over quality will mature into one that rewards both. It’s also too soon to determine how Clarivate’s recent decision to shift from perpetual access ebook sales to a subscription-only model may further complicate the delicate balance that many libraries try to maintain between subscription and monograph spending.

In addition to a greatly changed serials marketplace, Kurth and Welch might, with the rest of us, find it hard to predict what effects artificial intelligence and a new federal administration keen to transform government and geopolitics will have on public policy, public spending, health research, and higher education in coming years.

THE 2026 FORECAST

While much has changed in the marketplace over the decades, the bottom line has not: Library materials keep getting more expensive. Prices have begun trending upward again in recent years and a 5.5–6.5 percent price increase is predicted for 2026. Price increases were also analyzed for 7,800 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO Information Services. For 2024, the average rate of increase was 4 percent, compared to 5 percent in 2023 and 3.75 percent in 2023. R&P packages processed by EBSCO also showed an average price increase of 4 percent. In previous years, R&P packages had a lower average price increase than traditional packages, so this year’s identical rate increases may be a sign that R&P packages are becoming increasingly mainstream.

Mark Twain is sometimes credited with the adage, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Conversely, Swedish pop group ABBA crooned in their hit single “Waterloo,” “The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself.” Regardless of whether you believe history rhymes or repeats, periodicals pricing remains just as relevant an issue for librarians today as it was in 1960.

THE VALUE OF JOURNALS

Price alone is rarely the sole factor in determining the value of a journal. Relevance to local users and curricula, along with metrics such as cost per use and Impact Factor, all play a role in determining a journal’s value to the institution. The survey continues to work with the pricing data collected for this article to explore the relationship between prices and metrics such as Impact Factor, Eigenfactor, and Article Influence Score.

Table 9 examines the relationship between price and value. Title data in the Scopus, Clarivate, and EBSCO indexes were combined and then divided into broad price bands. The average for Impact Factor and Eigenfactor for all titles in a price band was then compared to the averages in the other price bands. This year, the average price ($10,109) for the most expensive journals was 31 times higher than the average price for least expensive ($322) journals, while the Impact Factor only increased 2.4 percent. The chart accompanying Table 9 provides a graphical view of the correlation between journal price and value: While all value metrics tend to increase with the increase in price, the rise in average price (represented by the blue line) is not accompanied by a corresponding rise in Impact Factor (represented by the burgundy line).

Table 10 reviews the ratio of citations to periodical costs by subject, and the percentage of citable gold OA articles. While average prices for STM journals tend to be high in comparison to other subjects, this scenario changes if the costs are divided by the numbers of citations. Chemistry has the highest average price, but sits in the middle of the pack when it comes to cost per citation. If citations are considered an indicator of value, then Chemistry journals, despite high average prices, are still relatively high-value journals. Conversely, journals in Philosophy and Religion, Music, and History, while less expensive, are also less frequently cited, so journals in those areas show the highest cost per citation.

Commercial publishers continue to have higher per-citation costs than other types of publishers. Commercial publishers showed a cost per citation of 32¢ and an average price of $2,328, while university presses showed 21¢ and an average price of $497, and societal publishers showed 9¢ and an average price of $763. However, when the percentage of citable OA gold articles was then also compared against publisher type, results showed that approximately 23 percent of articles from commercial publishers were citable OA articles, compared to 18 percent for both university and society publishers.

Content from the five major commercial publishers—Elsevier, Sage, SpringerNature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley—continues to represent over half the titles (55 percent) in the Clarivate Indexes, but makes up close to 81 percent of the dollar value.

METHODOLOGY

Survey tables are created by examining historical serials pricing information from EBSCO Information Services for serial titles indexed in Scopus, Clarivate Analytics Citation Indexes, EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate, and EBSCOhost MasterFILE Complete. Data for Impact Factor and other citation-based metrics is derived from Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Because these data sets are pulled using the latest pricing available from EBSCO Information Services, historical pricing tables may show slight variances when compared with tables from previous year articles.

Except for Tables 2 and 3, the price survey uses a print-preferred pricing model based on the standard retail price for the titles in the selected indexes. Despite the prevalence of online subscriptions, print pricing is still used for consistency because not all publishers make their online-only pricing available, or because they do not have a standard online-only retail price. The index contains pricing for print + online and online-only if those were the only rates offered.

Table 1 shows the average 2025 price for the top 15 scientific disciplines by using current year pricing information to determine the average price for a journal in a subject discipline, based on broad Library of Congress (LC) class.

Tables 2, 3, 4, and 7 are cost histories. Table 2 shows the year-over-year change in average price for journals indexed in Scopus in eight broad LC subject areas. Table 3 examines historical pricing costs for just online titles indexed in Clarivate Analytics Indexes by LC Subject. Prices are lower in this sample, as many of the large publishers use custom quotes for online prices; consequently, some high-price journals are not in the mix. Table 4 examines historical pricing information by LC subject area for titles indexed in EBSCOhost Academic Search. Table 7 examines historical pricing for all titles indexed in Clarivate.

Tables 5, 6, and 8 show cost projections for 2026. Table 5 predicts the average price increase for periodical titles indexed in EBSCOhost MasterFILE Complete, a multidisciplinary database and index used by many public and school libraries. Table 6 predicts the average price increase for periodical titles indexed in EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate, a multidisciplinary database and index used by many academic libraries. Although Table 5 averages numbers over three years, the sample size is still relatively small, meaning a large price change for a handful of titles impacts the overall price more so than if a large sample size was used.

Table 8 predicts the average price increase for periodical titles indexed in the three discipline-based Clarivate Analytics Web of Science citation indexes (Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, Science).

Together, these tables provide guidance as to where we can expect prices to be for the 2026 renewal season.

Siôn Romaine is Director of Acquisitions & Rapid Cataloging Services, University of Washington Libraries. Barbara Albee is Account Services Manager, EBSCO Information Services. Cynthia M. Elliott is Collection Management Librarian, University of Arizona Libraries. Stephen Bosch, Librarian Emeritus at the University of Arizona Libraries, assisted with the data tables.