A closer look at individual article sales in JSTOR’s international community
The data used in this report describes sales of articles from scholarly journals made to individuals around the world through JSTOR throughout 2014. These sales are made directly to individuals without access granted to them through an institutional license. Each article sale is also attached to the location of the customer, and I was curious to see what the sales data looked like internationally. This curiosity inherently implies a type of comparison, domestic to international, that found itself represented across different visualizations that I built.
As an American-born organization, JSTOR undoubtedly has a geographic tendency. I was interested in seeing how far that theory stretched. Specifically, I wanted to better understand the geographic reach in terms of the publishers that these sales represent, the individuals accessing that content, and the breadth of this domestic-international gap.
To begin, I wanted to see just how much of the content being purchased had been released by publishers outside the U.S. So, I grouped the publishers’ locations into groups of U.S. and International publishers then, using a bar graph representing articles bought, highlighted the international data with color to better focus the discrepancy.
Even though I had started this project assuming majority U.S. influence, I was still surprised at the intensity of this gap between publishers. Humanities was an especially intense U.S. lead area of study. At this point I began to wonder how many of those international publishers were publishers based out of the U.K. Using a tree map, I excluded U.S. data and saw that over 60% of publishers that weren’t in the U.S. were from the U.K. This leaves roughly ten percent of the total articles sold to the rest of the world.
Slightly disappointed at the lack of international representation within JSTOR’s publisher community, I wanted to see whether this discrepancy was similarly reflected with those who were accessing the content. So I made mirrored graphs of the two above replacing publisher location with customers’ location. This could have been done using a control to switch between publisher and customer location, but I thought having the charts side by side simultaneously made for easier comparison. You can see that article sales made outside the U.S. were surprisingly close to the amount of articles sold domestically across all areas of studies. Organized this way, there were even some areas of study in which international customers out bought their U.S. counterparts. Here again, the Humanities stick out, though this graph shows greater sales outside the U.S.
Again, I had this customer data separated in two categories, U.S. and international. So I recreated the tree map to see if the customers were mostly based in the U.K. as the publishers group was. I’ve used Blue throughout to highlight the international sales, which might make these tree maps look like the darker blue is somehow more international, but I felt that it was a safe enough color code given the attributes.
Overall I found that the pool of academic publishers selling articles does not match the diversity of individuals purchasing those articles. Even limiting the publisher pool to outside the U.S. we see an Anglophone, occidental dominance with U.K. publishers being the largest producer. The U.K. is also the largest international pool of customers. However, the division of sales by country represents a much more diverse market. Of course, the further I looked into my original questions, the more I became aware of the data that could affect results and that I simply didn’t have. For instance, the decision to view U.K. data distinct from other international data implies a further investigation into a linguistic bias but the article level data included doesn’t offer that characteristic.
Though sales in the U.S. made up over half of total article sales, I was actually surprised that international sales were still maintaining close to half. I didn’t have access to the data necessary, but an interesting next step into understanding international article sales according to relevancy of JSTOR access in other countries. I would also be curious to see how articles sold directly to individuals, without any institutional intermediary, would stack up against content accessed through institutions. Would the same thematic research topics be present?
To get a fuller picture of JSTOR’s international reach, these would be just some of the necessary data components. Still, I think working as a snapshot introduction to content being accessed it offers a few clear points. First, the geographical tendency appears to also be a cultural-linguistic tendency – though this is less concrete for diagramming. Also, the domestic focus is stronger within the publishing portion of individual articles sales than with the consumer groups purchasing them. Therefore, you might say that the publishing pool doesn’t accurately reflect its customer base. Having worked for a publisher of international work in translation, I recognize my own bias towards more international content in the U.S. market. Still, I think this could make for a good argument in seeking out a more culturally representative roster of publishers.
The next visualization I want to build for this dataset would act as a title page for the report. Right now, I’ve used a Bubble chart that acts as a reference to ‘Areas of Study’ and the ‘Specializations’ within each. If I could find a way to filter out only the top specialization (i.e. the specialization with the most articles sold) by individual country, I think that would make for a great map visualization, “What Researchers Research Where”. Beyond that central domestic-dominant pattern found in the content, I also was interested to see if there existed any other tendencies related to geography in the international market. Admittedly catchy, the visualization would make for a great looking way to start the fuller conversation about international content.
