Jisc has announced that it will be utilizing Unsub, an analytics dashboard, to help evaluate journal agreements that UK universities hold with publishers. The dashboard was created in 2019 by Our Research, a not-for-profit software company. Unsub can produce forecasts of different journal subscription scenarios, giving Jisc insight into the costs and benefits of subscription packages for each university and across the consortium.
With this initiative, Jisc seeks to support its members in evaluating the agreements they subscribe to in this period of financial uncertainty. According to Caren Milloy, director of licensing at Jisc, the new dashboard enables Jisc to look at the value derived across all participating members and to assess the impact of different collection models.
Unsub is currently used by over 400 research libraries worldwide, with the latest subscribing UK institutions being the University of Cambridge and Lancaster University. However, the new partnership will allow Jisc to extend Unsub’s data-driven insights beyond these individual universities, to encompass the entire UK higher education sector. In doing so, Jisc will join other consortia Unsub users, including the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (Canada), the Council of Australian University Librarians (Australia and New Zealand), the Joint Universitie Librarians Advisory Committee (Hong Kong) and LYRASIS (USA), among others.
The Unsub dashboard will streamline workflows and add new data to Jisc’s ongoing analysis efforts. Of particular value is Unsub’s ability to estimate the extent to which Open Access (OA) scholarly articles can replace existing subscription access. Due to the growth of OA, more than half of newly-published articles are now free to read.
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