Updated 11-4-2020
Our present model offers access to about 1600 titles for a cost of $153,386 and it ends this calendar year.
These proposals are non-starters.
Right now our model provides us access to 1600 journals for about $150,000, which is about $100 per title, but when you subtract the portion of titles that we don't use that cost comes out to about $5600 per title that we actually use (28 titles). Our most expensive on a per used title basis.
The a la carte subscription model (subscribe to individual titles) would provide us with about 2% of the access at 60% of the package cost. That means subscribing to 15 journals at a cost of roughly $87,000. This cost is about $5800 per title. I don't think it is any coincidence those costs are similar.
The so called "orderly retreat" is little more than a token gesture in a time of budgetary collapse. The "lowest 8.5% of usage" titles, which amounts to about 820 titles, are of no value to us whatsoever and see absolutely ZERO use, while another 287 titles see ZERO use in the last five years of publication. While we certainly wouldn't feel the loss of those titles, that 5% "discount" does not begin to address our budget situation and still leaves us with a drastically under utilized collection since we only use about 10% of the titles with any frequency (and a bill we can't afford).
Un-use | # Titles | % of Collection |
Zero Use | 1079 | 64.15% |
1 use | 188 | 11.18% |
2 uses | 112 | 6.66% |
3 uses | 59 | 3.51% |
4 uses | 29 | 1.72% |
5 uses | 29 | 1.72% |
Total Un-use | 1496 | 88.94% |
For additional context:
The Wiley deal that the library negotiated was transformative. It is a greater than 50% reduction in cost while maintaining access to the 168 titles that we identified that we really needed. Cost per title is about $595.
The Elsevier negotiation yielded 58 directly identified titles that ESF needed at the state contractual level (as well as access to the entire shared collection of about 200 titles) for a cost of $60,000 and an additional 22 titles carried at the institutional level for a total of about 222 titles for a cost of $165,000 which translates to about $745 per title which is not unreasonable.