Florida State University has entered into negotiations with publisher Elsevier to see how it can resolve a pricing issue. Back in April, FSU announced that it would not renew a so-called 'big deal' with Elsevier in 2019, due to its high cost, and would instead subscribe to a subset of the most-needed journals. The university's move represents the latest example of academic libraries walking away from these comprehensive and expensive subscriptions, which include all or most of a publisher's catalogue, and instead signing up for la carte titles.
Over the last few years, around two dozen libraries in the US and Canada have cancelled at least one big deal with a publisher.
According to Joseph Esposito of Clarke & Esposito, a publishing consultancy firm, a key driving force behind the recent uptick of package cancellations is the negotiating leverage that libraries have gotten as a result of sites such as Sci-Hub that provide free, illegal access to journal articles.
According to Roy Ziegler, the associate dean of collections development at FSU Libraries, because FSU is still in negotiations with Elsevier, it is possible the situation might change before subscriptions lapse at the end of the year.
In 2015, the University of Montreal decided to take an empirical approach to its subscription negotiations. To do so, the university closely examined the university's collection of approximately 50,000 journals to see which titles were essential for their faculty and students. The analysis, which combined usage and citation statistics with faculty surveys, revealed that only around 11.6 percent to 36.9 percent of the titles in their big-deal bundles were indispensable.
Other Canadian universities have conducted similar analyses to determine whether to cut down their journal subscriptions. Some of those have ended in cancellations. The University of Calgary, for example, cut more than 1,000 titles between 2015 and 2016, primarily through unbundling two packages with Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis, according to Thomas Hickerson, the university's vice-provost of libraries.
Driven by the European Commission's goal of making all scientific articles freely available by 2020, a number of countries have been pushing for more academic publishers to adopt so-called 'publish-and-read' models, which cover reading paywalled papers and publishing articles as 'gold' open access (immediately and freely available from the publisher) in one fee. While some of these negotiations have been successful, others have led to disagreements and stalled subscriptions.
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