We realised recently not everyone was aware of the changes to the the Taylor and Francis package earlier this year .  The background is that CAUL (Council of Australasian Librarians) continues to negotiate with major academic publishers over access to and pricing models for their packages.  The CAUL principles and framework for pricing electronic resources may be of interest.

From 2017 a new agreement with Taylor and Francis was negotiated.

Some of the changes include:
– Access to more content (226 journals in the new Medical Library)
– Transitioning to a pricing model based on EFTS/FTE and away from a model based on historical print spend (this will favour UC over time)
– Moving to a model that is lease access (opex) instead of perpetual access rights (capex)

One of the implications of this is that UC will only retain perpetual access to subscribed journal content under the old model which is for the years 2010-2016.  This means that if we were ever to cancel the Taylor and Francis package, we would not retain perpetual access rights to their new journal content (2017->) under the new model.  There is an option to pay for perpetual access rights at the end of each year for that year at 10% of the subscription cost.  Out of the 47 participating institutions in CAUL, so far only 10 have elected to fund perpetual access rights although we understand a number of institutions are considering the options.

Another change is that a  20 year rolling archive will be applied during the licence term.  For example in 2017 access will be granted back to 1997, in 2018 access back to 1998 and so on.  This is a global change initiated by Taylor and Francis so not just CAUL members are affected.  So what this means is that over time we will progressively have more gaps that will need to be filled by Interloan requests for instance.

It is possible there will be a shift to a similar model with other publishers too.

SAGE is doing the rounds at the moment asking libraries what our views are on package models from 2020 onwards (when the CAUL SAGE contract is due).  We have pointed out them the disadvantages we see with the T&F model.  CAUL, CONZUL and Elsevier have not yet reached an agreement about a new multi-year contract beyond 2017 so we are being rolled over on the current contract for 2018 while discussions between the parties continue.