How much does University of Aarhus spend a year on journals?

Upon reading about the obscene costs of journals, e.g. in this post, I decided to write to my local university library and ask. They responded with this:

Hej Emil

Du har sendt os et spørgsmål:

Jeg er interesseret i at finde ud af hvor mange penge AU bruger hvert år på at købe adgang til akademiske journaler. Jeg har kikket nogle budgetter igennem men fandt ikke noget.

Ved I hvor man kan finde den information?

Og spørgsmålet er sendt videre til mig, da det nok ikke er noget, der offentliggøres som et tal for sig selv. Jeg kan fortælle dig, at AU og SB i fællesskabet AU Library bruger ca. 45 mio. kroner pr. år på elektroniske ressourcer, hvoraf e-tidsskrifter udgør langt størstedelen – dertil kommer databaser, leksika og mere almindelige e-bøger.

Med venlig hilsen

Lilian

Lilian Madsen

Områdedirektør, Procesområdet

The relevant part translate to:

And the question has been sent to me because it is probably not something that is published as a number for itself. I can tell you that [the university and university library together] spends about 45 million kroner per year on electronic resources of which the large majority is is e-journals -- to that comes databases, lexicons, and normal e-books.

If we assume that the large majority means 90%, then the number is 40.5 million DKK a year. A DKK is about .15 USD, so this is about 6.075 million USD. Put this together with the number of students, currently 43,600, and one can calculate a cost per year per student. This value is 930 DKK or about 139.3 USD per year per student. If you think about it, this is a crazy price to pay. The marginal cost post extra student is near-zero.

Aarhus is currently the largest university in Denmark, but it is about the same size as Copenhagen which has 40,866 students.