Journalists jailed

At least 375 journalists and media workers are currently behind bars. China is incarcerating the most with 84 journalists in jail, followed by Myanmar (64), Turkey (51), Iran (34), Belarus (33), Egypt (23), Russia and occupied Crimea (29), Saudi Arabia (11), Yemen (10), Syria (9), and India (7).

“67 Journalists Killed so Far in 2022: IFJ Demands Immediate Action,” The International Federation of Journalists, December 9, 2022, https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-releases/article/67-journalists-killed-so-far-in-2022-ifj-demands-immediate-action.html.

Degrees/certificates by field of study

Title IV degree-granting institutions of higher education in the US awarded 5,005,309 degrees o certificates in the 2020–2021 academic year. The largest share of those (888,353) went to the health professions and related programs. Business and related support services earned 823,270 degrees or certificates. There were 6,519 degrees awarded in the field of library science.

National Center for Education Statistics, “Summary Tables—Completions—Degrees/Certificates by Field of Study,” 2022, https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/SummaryTables/report/360?templateId=3600&year=2021&expand_by=0&tt=aggregate&instType=1.

E-books

Key findings of the ACRL report, “The State of Ebooks in Academic Libraries: 2022,” include that 85 percent of academic libraries currently hold ebooks and digital audiobooks in their collections, non-curriculum-based ebooks and audiobooks are a rapidly growing segment, and ebook purchasing in most subject areas is up nearly 26 percent. While curriculum support continues to be the dominant element in ebook collection development, survey results indicate that non-curriculum-based ebooks are a rapidly growing portion of academic library digital collections (79 percent of respondents devote up to 10 percent of their collection to pleasure reading, which is a 14 percent increase from 2020).

Andi Barnett, “New Choice Survey Shows Shift in Academic Library Digital Collections toward Popular Fiction and Nonfiction,” OverDrive (blog), December 7, 2022, https://company.overdrive.com/2022/12/07/new-choice-survey-shows-shift-in-academic-library-digital-collections-toward-popular-fiction-and-nonfiction.

Research output

“According to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), U.S. researchers contributed approximately 464,000 of the 2.9 million peer-reviewed scientific articles published in science and engineering journals worldwide in 2020, representing about 16 percent of total output. OSTP estimates that between 195,000 and 263,000 of these articles were the result of federally funded R&D.”

Marcy E. Gallo, “Public Access to Scientific Publications Resulting from Federally Funded R&D,” Congressional Research Service, November 16, 2022, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12049.

Textbooks

“The average postsecondary student spends between $628 and $1,471 annually for books and supplies as of the 2021–2022 academic year. Hard copy books can cost as much as $400, with an average price between $80 and $150. The price of textbooks increases by an average of 12 percent with each new edition. Between 1977 and 2015, the cost of textbooks increased 1,041 percent. The increase in the cost of textbooks outpaced currency inflation by 238 percent from 1977 to 2015.”

Melanie Hanson, “Average Cost of College Textbooks [2022]: Prices per Year,” Education Data Initiative, July 15, 2022, https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-textbooks.

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email.unc.edu