|
Aggregating services have been used by libraries and publishers for many years. These "middlemen" services typically perform such functions as handling orders, billing, payments, journal renewals and cancellations. Libraries and publishers both have realized cost savings and efficiencies by using aggregators.
The electronic environment has presented publishers with a new way to aggregate (without the middlemen) by bringing content together and offering all of a publisher's electronic journals to libraries as a package. On the surface, this appears to be a good deal. For publishers, bringing all electronic journals together in a single database allows the development of sophisticated search engines and other services. Libraries can still realize processing efficiencies, and can often provide access to more content by subscribing to the aggregator's packages.
How the "Big Deal" Works
These aggregations by commercial publishers, often called the "Big Deal" by librarians, are marketed by publishers as a way to cap inflationary journal prices. If a library buys (or more accurately, licenses) all of a publisher's electronic journal titles, that library will pay an amount roughly equal to current payments (for the current subset of the publisher's titles that a library already gets) plus some increment. The library can usually buy additional print copies for a discounted price and cancel some print copies for a small savings. But the content is now bundled so that electronic subscriptions cannot be cancelled; or, if they are, the realized savings is very small. These packages are usually multi-year deals, so significant portions of a library's budget are committed for a period of time, with little or no flexibility.
Caveat Emptor
While there are some short term advantages to the "Big Deal", there are also long term implications for purchasing aggregate subscriptions, some of which are problematic. Issues which must be considered include the following:
- Libraries lose control over selection decisions and may not be able to meet the changing needs of faculty, researchers, and students. Libraries cannot cancel titles that may no longer be useful to a campus, or may have declined in quality. Similarly, a bundled plan may include titles that never would have been selected by librarians or faculty, either because they are not needed or are not of sufficient quality. Bundled content with long-term subscriptions offers publishers little incentive to terminate lower quality titles.
- Libraries may end up committing larger proportions of their collections budgets to fewer publishers. The result is that libraries are less able to purchase new titles from other publishers, and may even result in the need to cancel some currently subscribed titles.
- The Big Deal can have an exclusionary effect on competition and the entry of new journals into the market, affecting the entire scholarly community. Ironically, these packages of electronic titles serve as an effective barrier to new journals at the same time that advances in electronic publishing would make it increasingly feasible for smaller, non-profit, or alternative publishers to enter the market.
- Libraries typically spend 70-80% of their collections budgets on serial subscriptions. In general, subscription prices are much higher for commercially produced journals than for non-profit journals. A 2001 study finds that the average price per page for elite journals is about six times as high as for non-profit journals, and shows similar results for less prestigious journals. [1]
Recent Campus and Library Responses to the Big Deal
In a 2002 survey conducted by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), 65% of responding libraries with subscriptions to Reed Elsevier's electronic journals also subscribed to their bundled offering, ScienceDirect, in a multi-year deal. In a 2003 survey of 57 libraries, 22 indicated they were planning to cancel or considering canceling a bundled package. [2]
Actions taken are not limited to ARL libraries and include the following:
- Cornell University's annual bill for Reed Elsevier's ScienceDirect package reached $1.7 million in 2003. Those 930 titles amounting to less than 2% of the serial subscriptions, accounted for more than 20% of the Library's total serials expenditures. The Faculty Senate unanimously supported the Library's plan to retain control of serials expenditures by moving away from the bundled package and canceling a number of Elsevier titles.
- Harvard University, with a larger serials budget than any other academic library in the country, also canceled ScienceDirect which cost them four times more than the expenditure for the next largest STM journal publisher. Sidney Verba, library director, wrote that the decision was driven not only by financial realities but, more importantly, by the need to reassert control over collections and encourage new models for research publication.
- The Triangle Research Libraries Network, a consortium consisting of Duke, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina, declined to renew their subscription to ScienceDirect. They cite significant annual cost increases above the current contract terms and no-cancellation policies as being unsustainable for TRLN libraries.
- Four small private Minnesota Colleges, Carleton, Gustavus Adolphus, Macalester, and St. Olaf, independently decided to decline a three year renewal of ScienceDirect in February of 2004, citing escalating prices and an unsustainable pricing model.
- The University of Maryland and the University of Minnesota also refused the Big Deal subscription with ScienceDirect in 2004.
- The University of California renewed its subscription, but only after some hard bargaining. The chancellors at all nine UC campuses announced that if the jointly negotiated agreement failed, no individual campus would be allowed to negotiate separately with Reed Elsevier. The end result is that the UC system will spend about 25% less on Elsevier journals in 2004 than they did in 2003. The Academic Senate issued a Letter to University of California Faculty on Negotiations with Elsevier and System-wide Efforts to Effect Change in Scholarly Communication.
Another alternative:
- The OhioLINK academic library consortium has a different perspective on big deals. This consortium actively supports changes on the publisher side in reforming scholarly communications, but also believes that libraries must reorganize and reorient themselves to take full advantage of digital information systems. Here, statewide cooperation allowed for negotiating licenses that they find have been advantageous to libraries throughout Ohio.
Learn More
Aaron S. Edlin & Daniel Rubenfeld, "Exclusion or Efficient Pricing? The 'Big Deal' Bundling of Academic Journals" ABA: Antitrust Law Journal 72, no.1 (2004):119-157.
Kenneth Frazier, "The Librarians' Dilemma: Contemplating the Costs of the 'Big Deal'" D-Lib Magazine 7, no.1 (March 2001).
Sanville, Thomas J., " A Method Out of the Madness: OhioLINK's Collaborative Response to the Serials Crisis Three Years Later: A Progress Report" The Serials Librarian 40, no1/2 (2001):129-55.
Footnotes
-
-
|