Research Libraries UK (RLUK) has announced that at a recent workshop for members it unveiled a journal subscription model that allows members to carefully analyse the value-for-money of publisher packages. Using the model, members can also determine whether there would be cost savings to be made from moving back to title-by-title purchasing. The model allows each member to combine pricing information with the usage their community makes of the relevant journals. The library can then alter the combination of title-by-title subscriptions and document delivery options and compare the costs of these combinations to the cost of the big deals.
As budgets become tighter and journal subscription prices increase, it is imperative that libraries look to new metrics to assess value for money. This is especially true in the case of 'big deals' - large aggregations of journals from publishers sold as a single package. Some of these packages now cost RLUK members over £1million per year and account for an ever increasing proportion of library budgets. Such deals have proved attractive as they allow libraries to expand the range of titles they provide to users for a relatively small additional fee. But to date RLUK members have lacked a simple way to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of these packages.
Initial testing of the latest model by a small group of test-sites reportedly shows that the majority of download come from a minority of journals, with some titles being used only sporadically. This offers the possibility that for some combinations of subscriptions and document delivery the total cost will be less than the cost of the big deal. Libraries are now expected to be in a strong position to make informed decisions on the best ways to spend their limited budgets on maximising access to the resources that their researchers and students require.
Concurrently, RLUK is working with its members on ways in which document delivery can be improved and made more efficient.
Research Libraries UK is a consortium of 30 research organisations in the UK and Ireland, including the three UK national libraries. Founded more than 25 years ago, RLUK has directly and indirectly sponsored some of the major free online UK resources in support of research, including Copac, the de facto UK Union Catalogue.
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