Re: Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential Budget Cuts

["\"FrederickFriend\"" <ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk>]

In reply to Rajia and to Shirley in her earlier post, it is clear 
that users in small to medium-sized libraries have been gaining 
access to a broad range of titles through Big Deals, and this has 
been a plus-point for that business model. However, the benefit 
has been obtained at great cost to the academic community, not 
only financial cost but also academic cost in not having access 
to the research monographs and smaller journals which have had to 
be sacrificed in order to pay for the Big Deals. Moreover the new 
open access models hold out the promise of unrestricted access to 
all journals, not only those contained in Big Deals, with a 
better benefit to cost ratio than the Big Deals. I do not 
under-estimate the magnitude of the change in business models, 
but bigger changes in business models are already happening in 
the music industry without the industry collapsing.

Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL



----- Original Message -----
From: "Tobia, Rajia C" <TOBIA@uthscsa.edu>
To: "Rais, Shirley (LLU)" <srais@llu.edu>; <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2009 6:59 AM
Subject: RE: Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential Budget Cuts


>I feel I must chime in, too.  In the late 1980s and most of the
> 1990s, we also painfully canceled many journal titles due to flat
> budgets, budget cuts, and inflationary increases.  By joining in
> consortial "Big Deals" starting in the late 1990s, we were able
> to offer our faculty and students a richer mix of titles than
> ever before possible.
>
> We did an analysis in 2004 of our Big Deals with Elsevier, Wiley,
> and Blackwell.  We wanted to find out how much it would cost to
> replace shared titles we received because we are part of a
> consortium Big Deal. We wanted to make sure we were getting value
> for our dollars.  We analyzed titles that our library received
> through a consortium Big Deal with those three publishers. The
> titles we reviewed were titles that were not part of our
> historically subscribed titles but shared titles among the
> consortium.  We arbitrarily picked an article download rate of
> 100 or more article downloads per title per year as being high
> use.  We then looked at the full subscription costs of these
> titles. It would have cost the library an additional $500,000+ to
> subscribe to these shared consortium titles on our own, an
> additional $500,000 that we just do not have.
>
> Now, I am not a big fan of Big Publishing but on a practical
> level, it would be very difficult for our faculty and researchers
> to lose access to these highly used titles. I think for the small
> to medium sized academic library, Big Deals have not been an
> entirely bad thing, particularly if there are pooled consortium
> subscriptions as the backbone of the deal. The economic times are
> tough and we may have to bow out of some of our Big Deals, but at
> a loss of many titles that are being used on our campus.
>
> Rajia Tobia, A.M.L.S.
> Executive Director of Libraries
> University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
> Briscoe Library
> Mail Code 7940
> 7703 Floyd Curl Drive
> San Antonio, TX 78229--3900
> Phone: 210/567-2413
> Fax: 210/567-2490
> mailto:tobia@uthscsa.edu
>
>