It’s a simple question with a not so simple answer, and I’ll probably need a follow-up post to cover all the complexities. Publishers do their best to obfuscate prices through journal bundling (making it difficult to determine the price of a specific journal and also making it difficult to cancel specific journals) and through the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). These practices further warp what is a badly dysfunctional “market” in which publishers have profit margins comparable to Google or Apple (30%+), all by taking free content from faculty members and selling it back to us.
The annual costs below are list price, not actual price. Through what seems to be a combination of NDAs preventing price sharing, and lack of a good internal price querying method, I’m not able to provide the actual (i.e. “negotiated”) amount that Virginia Tech is paying for these journals. So this list doesn’t include all journals Virginia Tech subscribes to (I’m told one or more of the AIP journals might make this top ten list) or accurate prices (either because we can’t tell you or can’t get them out of our system).
With all those caveats in mind, here are the ten most expensive journals that Virginia Tech subscribes to:
| Journal | Publisher | Cost |
| Journal of Comparative Neurology | Wiley-Blackwell | $30,860 |
| Journal of Applied Polymer Science | Wiley-Blackwell | $26,714 |
| Brain Research | Elsevier | $24,038 |
| Molecular Crystals & Liquid Crystals | Taylor & Francis | $21,104 |
| Journal of Polymer Science | Wiley-Blackwell | $21,000 |
| Tetrahedron | Elsevier | $20,773 |
| Electronics and communications in Japan | Wiley-Blackwell | $20,712 |
| Ferroelectrics | Taylor & Francis | $19,683 |
| Journal of Chromatography A | Elsevier | $18,688 |
| Chemical Physics Letters | Elsevier | $17,257 |
