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

[Rick Anderson]

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<…>

True enough — but the question (or one important question, anyway) is “how big is that fraction?”.

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

I don’t think a year goes by that my institution doesn’t think about this.

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)?

That’s exactly where we end up every time we consider breaking up one of our two Big Deals. If we were to cancel, for example, our Elsevier Big Deal, we would end up paying more for the journals we’d have to subscribe to separately than we currently pay for the whole shebang. There’s no question that the Big Deal is tremendously wasteful in some very real ways — and yet, even taking its wastefulness into account, it remains (painful as it may be to say so) a tremendously good value for us.

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Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
rick.anderson at utah.edu

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