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

Price, Apryl acprice at fsu.edu
Mon Nov 9 10:08:10 PST 2015


We just made the decision to drop our Springer package. The cancellation discussion arose because our budget has not seen appropriate growth for years. We had been paying ongoing costs with one-time money and from unfilled librarian positions. Now, that money isn’t there to fill the holes. We needed to cancel a large amount, and big deals were the only way to get there (monographs had been cut in previous years).

A teaching faculty task force was convened, and they decided we should cancel Springer. Springer is our least used big deal package, and our CPU is 2-3 times higher than other packages. We were not able to agree to alternative terms, so we will go title by title.

We will lose current access to about 1400 titles in 2016. We are a research university, so I’m worried because will be losing access to some high usage titles. However, some schools have said they didn’t see huge amounts of ILL requests. We will monitor ILL requests over time.

Our biggest issue is an inadequate budget, but pricing model was another issue for some. Some people here hate the historical spend model, because we pay much more than larger universities within our consortia license.

Apryl Price
Electronic Resources Collection Management Librarian
Florida State University
711 West Madison Street
Tallahassee, Florida 32306

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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