E-Journal admin costs

["Rollo Turner" <rollo.turner@onet.co.uk>]

Counting the cost of e-journal admin

Has anyone out there stopped to measure the costs of administering
e-journals? By this I mean the cost of subscription management and access
provision. It seems to me that as the process of acquiring journals
changes a great deal of simplicity is being lost with consequent and often
quite substantial impacts on cost.

As a result the ASA is interested in how we can ease this process, and
would welcome feedback on the following (and would be happy to share the
results with the lis):

1. Have your costs for e-Journal admin risen over the last year & roughly
by how much?

2. Do you see this increasing/decreasing over the next year?

3. In which areas does your agent help most/least currently?

4. If there were additional resources available from your agent where
these would be best targeted?

The background on this is that libraries now buy their electronic journals
in a number of different ways - from the normal subscription process
through an agent to consortium deals no two of which ever seem to be
similar let alone the same! In some cases however the journals publishers
request that the journals must be ordered directly - even when the library
may have preferred to use an agent. Others are acquired through consortia
but may be paid for by the individual members through an agent, directly
or through the consortium. The so-called Big Deal with deep discount
prices has also greatly increased the administrative complexity for
everyone concerned, they tie in funds for lengthy periods of time and may,
if budgets are suddenly reduced, force libraries to cancel titles from
smaller and high quality society publishers to keep some of these Big
Deals going.

These different means of acquiring content mean that each individual
library has had to assume more control over the management and reporting
on the electronic journals taken. This is a role that is generally
performed by subscription agents who have the necessary infrastructure
available to provide value-added services such as special billing
arrangements, interfacing to library ILS services and management
reporting. Instead if each library is now doing more not less subscription
administration the overall costs are likely to rise in terms of staff time
and resources especially if libraries have to set up their own systems.

Agents costs will also rise if more and more electronic titles are handled
direct at the insistence of the publishers (generally the larger
publishers) leaving agents to handle the specialist, more varied and
widely scattered smaller publishers. According to the UK Competition
Commission, the big six publishers account for about 66% of all
expenditure on STM journals for UK libraries. If their titles are removed
from the agency list, the average cost per subscription will increase very
significantly and, obviously, additional costs will eventually be
reflected in their bills to libraries.

With this trend and pricing models requiring a variety of different means
of handling electronic journals, the complexity and cost of handling
subscriptions may well be increasing much faster than we currently know.
Agents of course were put on this earth to help reduce the libraries costs
and administration enabling them to reduce the amount of unproductive
administration performed by skilled individuals. It seems this sensible
approach has gone into reverse!

Isn't it time we thought about simplifying the system, so that once again
it can be handled by properly qualified intermediaries to the benefit of
all? This may require agents having to learn new and sometimes costly
skills, publishers agreeing to work with them on electronic journals as
they do with paper, and agents and consortia agreeing to cooperate more
closely in the future.

If the customers want this to happen, the suppliers will eventually
provide it. And it would be good for publishers since it would make it
simpler for them to sell their journals individually or in packages to
their clients in a well managed supply chain, thus reducing their
administration costs also (publishers subscription management costs may
also have increased by between 5 and 15% according to Sally Morris). In
short, such a move would be worth it financially to everyone.

Rollo Turner Secretary General Association of Subscription Agents and
Intermediaries

PS apologies for cross posting