[Eril-l] Is Breaking Up THAT Hard to Do?

[Bulock, Christopher J]

For 2015, the CSU system dropped its consortial Wiley big deal, so all 23 campuses were left to figure it out on their own. We carefully reviewed our usage and list prices to see what would make the most sense. We treated it as kind of an experimental year. So we took a close look at COUNTER JR5 (usage by year of publication) reports to see which titles would not be well served by our existing perpetual access. Based on that analysis, we went with subscriptions to just a handful of titles. Now, we’re looking at ILL stats (much lower than expected for cancelled titles) and turnaways to see if we need to switch up our subscriptions. While faculty and grad students certainly do make use of this content, I suspect a large percentage of our usage of the big deals comes from undergrads who do not necessarily have to do exhaustive research. That explains why we might see moderate usage for a title while we have a subscription but then have 0 ILL requests after we cancel.

Chris Bulock
Electronic Resources Librarian
California State University Northridge
818-677-6302

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Colleen A McGhee-French
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 8:05 AM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: [Eril-l] Is Breaking Up THAT Hard to Do?

Hi all,

I tried searching the archives of this list, but perhaps I am not doing it correctly. I couldn't find any discussion of the idea of/implementation of/success with breaking up journal packages.

Yet I would think we all have them - huge, huge journal packages, each containing more than 1200 or so journals, only a fraction of which are important/used - sometimes very important/highly used, each also containing hundreds of journals that we're paying for that have not been used in the last several years, at least to our knowledge.

Has your institution thought about this? Tried it? Succeeded/failed at it, and why? What were the largest obstacles to success?

Or has your institution thought about it and figured, Hey - the very important journals are used SO MUCH that the package overall is actually fairly economical and that those are the journals to concentrate on (rather than the huge number of unused journals)?

Thoughts?

Colleen
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