Update 10/13/2020
Due to years of rent-seeking behavior from publishers, the cost of scholarly journals has outpaced the consumer price index by a factor of four to five. This has brought many institutions to a point of reckoning where the fiscally prudent decision was to separate from so-called "Big Deal" publisher packages. It is no different for the F. Franklin Moon Library at ESF.
Budget:
For FY2018-2019 the Library expended $894,645 on resources.
For FY2019-2020 the Library expended $747,214 on resources.
That is a 16.5% reduction and the library is again looking at a substantial cut.
With structural-level cuts to funding, the library must make structural adjustments to how it provides access to the scholarly content necessary to fulfill the research and teaching mission of the college.
- Over 90% of library OTPS goes to sustaining subscriptions
- When a budget is leveraged like that, and most library budgets are, any cuts put us in a precarious situation as it means significant change in how we access scholarly content.
- Giving the yet-unknown budget situation vs when we process renewals the library is very pressed for time to make what are pivotal decisions in terms of access.
Our goals:
- Maintain access to core content. We have cut $30,000-40,000 per year from individual subscriptions since 2012, at this point there is nothing left to cut from there.
- Make secondary content as quickly and easily accessible as possible, and in a cost effective manner.
- Free up enough money in the budget to support robust fulfillment services for everything else.
Our plan of action:
- Examine publisher packages as they come due for renewal and or as financial need dictates.
- Present lists of what we have identified as the most used titles within packages and costs for those packages to the community for feedback
- If separation is feasible:
- Subscribe to core titles
- Move moderate use titles to rapid fulfillment with as little mediation as possible. Given the budget circumstance this has yet to be implemented.
- All other access is via conventional fulfillment services (interlibrary loan, document delivery, purchase on demand)
The costs:
- Some tasks will become much more time intensive for library staff such as:
- Creating new workflows to purchase content and managing title-level access
- Managing token access programs
- Increased volume in fulfillment services. The UC system has seen about a 10% increase YTD.
- More manual updating of holdings records on numerous platforms.
- The full fiscal position won’t be known until all is said and done.
Savings:
- We have separated from the Elsevier big-deal, now holding a shared SUNY collection plus local subscriptions. Over $70,000 was saved.
- We have separated from the Wiley big-deal, maintaining access to some 85% of the titles we used and reducing spending by over $116,000.
- We are optimistic we can realize some cost reduction, but as this represents a shift away from decades of trends in access we cannot project what those savings might be. Due to the added work of breaking up big packages and managing the various replacement means of access there may be no savings when personnel costs are considered.
- It will free us from multi-year, multi-hundred thousand dollar contracts which will allow us greater budget flexibility.
- This may allow us to free up enough funds to focus more on one-time-purchase access where we buy perpetual access to collections rather than lease access. This type of investment pays off over time.
Aut viam inveniam aut faciam.
Sources:
Rent Seeking and Financialization Strategies of the Academic Publishing Industry http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/
ARL Statistics Survey Statistical Trends https://www.arl.org/arl-statistics-survey-statistical-trends/
Big Deal Cancelation Tracking https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/
