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

[Arndt,Theresa]

Hi Colleen –

We are small (2400 students) so our use is never going to be that high on most titles.   The main obstacle we have encountered is publishers (more than one) who require us to maintain our “historic spend”.  That is, they will not allow us to cancel titles in order to save money.  If we try to cancel unused titles, they charge us more for the remaining titles, so in the end we don’t save any money.   We got very assertive with one publisher after years of this (guess which one), and they caved a bit last year.  I think they only did because they were afraid we would drop all their journals as some libraries have done.  But now they are back to hiking up our renewal costs well above inflation.

The “list prices” on many of the titles that are used the most are often so egregiously high that when I’ve done the math, I found we would not be ahead trying to unbundle and cancel the zero-use titles.   I’m sure the publishers look at exactly which titles none of us are using, and price them into the bundles accordingly.

IMHO, libraries need to do more to collectively fund open access alternatives.  Our library funds BioMed Central, Open Library of Humanities, Knowledge Unlatched (books), Independent Voices (primary source material).   Open Library of Humanities is funded through reasonable library membership fees, not author charges, and is having success with getting journals to switch from their current commercial or society platforms to the OLH open access platform; see:   https://www.openlibhums.org/

Thanks for raising this question, I will be interested in hearing other responses.
- Theresa

Theresa Arndt, MLS
Associate Director for Library Resources and Administration
Library and Information Services
Dickinson College
P.O. Box 1773
Carlisle, PA 17013
voice:  717-245-1750
fax:  717-245-1439
arndtt at dickinson.edu<mailto:arndtt at dickinson.edu>

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Colleen A McGhee-French
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 11:05 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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