In late 2008, the University of Oregon’s library faced a financial double punch. The recession meant belt tightening across the university at a time when the rising cost of journal subscriptions had already put a strain on the library’s budget. “We were faced with a two-pronged financial attack here,” recalled David C. Fowler, the library’s head of licensing, grants administration, and collection analysis.
Something had to give. That something, as it turned out, was Oregon’s so-called Big Deals with two heavyweight publishers, Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons. Big Deals provide large collections of journal articles but also lock institutions into multiyear subscriptions at rising prices that many libraries say they can no longer afford. At Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, another institution under pressure to make ends meet, those deals were eating up 40 percent of the library’s materials budget.
Both Southern Illinois and Oregon recently turned their anxiety over Big Deals into action. They renegotiated some and cut others altogether in favor of a return to individual subscriptions. The savings: as much as several hundred thousand dollars. The consequences many libraries have feared—loud objections from faculty members and financial penalties from publishers—have not come to pass.
Their experience has been positive enough that it is likely to embolden other institutions to reconsider their own deals with publishers.
But walking away from a Big Deal takes a lot of number crunching and some negotiating nerve. “It saves you money ultimately, but it requires a lot of work to put it in motion,” Mr. Fowler says.
Reality, Not Revolution
The libraries present moving away from Big Deals as an unavoidable response to hard times, not an act of revolution against large-scale commercial publishing. “Primarily it was a financial decision,” said Jonathan A. Nabe, collection-development librarian at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, which has left three Big Deals—with Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier—in the past three years. The library has an operating budget of about $11-million and a materials budget of about $5.3-million, much of which had been going to the Big Deals, according to Mr. Nabe.
“We simply could not afford to stay in the deals, because by their very nature those deals locked us into a specific amount of money that we had to provide every year, and that increased every year 5 or 6 percent,” Mr. Nabe said. “We just could not sustain that.”
By cutting 230 titles, mostly in science and engineering—the fields with the most expensive journals—the library saved $300,000 a year. It now has scaled-back, multiyear licensing agreements in place with Elsevier and Wiley. It buys access to the Springer journals it wants on a title-by-title subscription basis.
Mr. Fowler, at the Oregon library, tells a similar story. In the 2008 fiscal year, the library had a total budget of a bit less than $20-million. Almost $6.5-million of that went to pay for journals, databases, and other research materials. Those numbers were about the same for the 2009 fiscal year. With some journal prices growing by as much as 10 percent a year, Mr. Fowler said, the library decided in early 2009 that it would aim to cancel $1.2-million worth of material over a two-year period.
During its last round of cuts, in 2005, the Oregon library had already done away with most of the duplicate print editions of journals it got in electronic form. That left the Big Deals as an obvious target. “There was going to be no realistic way to make the budget cuts we had to make without doing away with one or more of our Big Deals,” Mr. Fowler said.
In the past few years, the university has had Big Deals with several publishers, negotiated by the Orbis Cascade Alliance and the Greater Western Library Alliance consortia. Such deals allow groups of libraries to get access to materials at a better rate than they’d get individually.
As publishers point out, Big Deals put an abundance of information at researchers’ fingertips. More and more, though, librarians respond that a lot of that material doesn’t get used. “We were getting a lot of titles, but a large number of them were getting little or no usage,” Mr. Fowler said.
Among libraries, he said, “the position is swinging from wanting to buy as much access as possible to buying smaller sets of smarter access—more-focused collections of the things we actually need to support our teaching and research.”
Because Oregon’s licenses with Elsevier and Wiley were about to expire, the library decided to take aim at those two deals. The first step was to figure out which journals were and weren’t getting used. So Oregon librarians analyzed 2007 and 2008 data from 360 Counter, a widely used service that tracks electronic journal usage and access. They came up with spreadsheets that laid out cost-per-use figures for each title, and set a goal of retaining subscriptions to the journals with the highest usage.
The library joined forces with Oregon State University and eventually with Portland State University to analyze usage and talk about how to collaborate on collection development. Then, armed with spreadsheets, “we went to Elsevier and said, ‘Hey, we want a deal,’” Mr. Fowler said.
At the Bargaining Table
The publisher did not exactly welcome the libraries’ request for a renegotiation of terms, he said. “Although I can’t imagine they would have been surprised, given the general economic situation in library-land, they were a little skittish at first.”
According to Mr. Fowler, Elsevier asked for separate meetings with the three institutions. They declined, seeing it as a divide-and-conquer strategy. Once at the negotiating table, however, “Elsevier played pretty fair,” he said. “I would say that they were at least moderately surprised that we were so well prepared with our facts and figures, but it was a good thing for us.”
Some intensive bargaining followed. The negotiations produced what Mr. Fowler called a “minideal” or “medium deal” that reduced the outlay on Elsevier journals by about 11 percent and saved the university about $45,000.
The library considered trying to arrive at a similar minideal with Wiley. But the renegotiation with Elsevier had left the library staff feeling “pretty fried,” Mr. Fowler said. “We decided it was really impractical for us to broker another deal with another publisher at that time.” Instead, Oregon canceled almost 100 Wiley journal titles, saving more than $168,000, and decided to resubscribe to individual Wiley journals instead of entering into another package deal.
That didn’t meet the library’s total goal, but it helped. So did cuts in subscriptions from other publishers’ databases and journals, and a helping hand from a sympathetic provost who spared the library some of the recisions it thought it was going to have to make. The prospect of not having to pay steadily rising journal prices in the next few years “allowed us not to have to worry about another major cancellation project before 2014 at the earliest,” Mr. Fowler said.
Together the reductions amounted to about a quarter of the journals the library cut in 2009, Mr. Fowler said. Among the journals cut were Wiley’s Geological Journal, the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, and FEMS Microbiology Letters, along with Elsevier’s Consciousness and Cognition, Experimental Cell Research, and Virology.
Mr. Nabe, at Southern Illinois, described the publishers as “not happy at all” with the prospect of scaling back their agreements. “Essentially it’s a guaranteed revenue stream for them,” he said. “They tried to make it as painful as possible, so that we would make the decision not to leave.” For instance, according to Mr. Nabe, one publisher tried to impose what he called a “punishment fee” on the university by charging it an extra content fee. (The threat was averted.)
Why Publishers Like Size
Most publishers don’t discuss Big Deals publicly, citing the need to protect proprietary information. Elsevier representatives told The Chronicle the company did not want to comment on its licensing negotiations.
Wiley representatives responded to a reporter’s request for comment too late to be interviewed for this article. But Reed Elfenbein, managing director of sales and marketing for the scholarly division, said via e-mail that Wiley understood that “many libraries are facing challenging times, and there is no one type of deal that fits all—we want our customers to have access to as much of our high-quality content as possible within their budget constraints.”
John Tagler is vice president and executive director of professional and scholarly publishing at the Association of American Publishers. He described Big Deals—a term he doesn’t like—as a good way to get the most access at a good rate, and pointed out that they come in many shapes and sizes. “It is a very attractive arrangement in the right circumstances,” he said. “It’s certainly not for everybody.”
According to Mr. Tagler, publishers do understand that libraries are under financial pressure. “Publishers have evolved a lot of subscription models, a lot of pricing models, and they’ve been pretty good about responding to the market’s needs and requests,” he said. “Very often people like to focus on the negatives and controversies and not really focus on the positives.”
Publishers will be worried if a movement to ditch Big Deals catches on, he said. “But they’ll have a dialogue, and they’ll try to work out other models that will be suitable"—more-tailored subscription packages, for instance.
Librarians are clearly interested in alternatives. Mr. Fowler and Mr. Nabe gave a well-attended joint presentation on the topic at a library conference in June.
Mr. Nabe asked how many of the audience members were considering leaving Big Deals. “Almost everybody raised their hands,” he said.
Relatively few have tried it yet. Mr. Fowler thinks that fear is what has held a lot of libraries back. “Fear of change, fear of upsetting the apple cart,” he said. “They’re afraid of faculty blowback and student reaction and ‘What if the vendor’s mean to us?’”
Few Complaints
In Mr. Fowler’s experience, though, the worry about negative faculty reaction is unjustified. On the Wiley cuts, “we got very little pushback,” he said. Some members of the chemistry and physics departments were more concerned about losing access to Elsevier journals.
“We certainly have not had the backlash that many people fear,” Mr. Nabe said of the response at Southern Illinois. “If you explain that journal prices increase 8 percent a year and we can’t continue to do that, I think most faculty will be understanding.”
Both he and Mr. Nabe emphasize the importance of consulting with faculty members on which journals can go and which are essential, and making the most of interlibrary loan systems to fill gaps.
Michael Haley, head of the chemistry department at the University of Oregon, sounds pragmatic about the cuts there. “Like most scientists, we want it yesterday,” he said. “So if it’s something that’s really used a lot, you want to be able to have fairly quick access. But if you’ve got to go to interlibrary loan, then interlibrary loan it is.”
An organic chemist, he has not noticed a negative effect so far on his own or his colleagues’ research because of lost access. “I can say over all that my group has not been impacted significantly,” he said.
Further cuts, though, could hurt. “We’re pretty much down to the meat on the bone now,” he said.
It helps the library’s cause—and should probably worry publishers—that Mr. Haley had already decided not to submit papers to Elsevier journals. “I’ve chosen not to publish in their journals as a protest, because of their obscene prices” and because of declining quality, he said. “In some sense, they’ve marginalized themselves.” He now prefers Organic Letters, published by the American Chemical Society, to Elsevier’s Tetrahedron Letters.
Mr. Nabe thinks the Big Deals are being pushed to the side as well. especially at public institutions, “we’re just not going to be able to afford them anymore,” he said. “But I don’t expect publishers will give them up easily or quietly.”
