This year for our annual continuing resources review, we will be focusing on the top 4-5 major journal packages.  Most of the Library’s multi-year subscriptions to journal packages including Elsevier, Wiley and Springer are coming to the end of the current contract in 2021.  The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) consortium has begun negotiations on behalf of us and other CAUL libraries with the publishers.  There is also the impetus and the opportunity to move to Open Access for some agreements.

Background
Since the early 2000s eJournals have been universally accepted as the norm.  Publishers continued to look for ways for money to spin and so enter the package deal – the current model.  Packages have been around for the best part of 20 years at Canterbury.  The advantage with packages is that they are cheaper than subscribing to individual journals at list price.  We also receive access to most (if not all) of the published titles and they receive high use.  But they come with strings, individual titles within a package cannot be cancelled, there may be variable quality within packages as well as titles which have no relevance to UC teaching or research.

Changes expected to impact UC
A top priority in CAUL’s negotiations with the publishers is cost containment. This is due largely to the ongoing impact of Covid, loss of revenue from international students unable to enter Australia and New Zealand, and the impact of this on universities’ finances.

CAUL is also looking for the opportunity to move to an open access deal with at least one of the big publishers. Read and Publish agreements are coming and we have dipped our toes in the water signing up to four small ones.  These represent a shift from subscription-based reading to open access publishing.  A Read and Publish agreement is where a publisher receives payment for reading and publishing (eg article processing charges) in one single contract.

CAUL has asked each provider to provide 3 proposals including a proposal for an open access or Read and Publish agreement, a reduction on the package price if OA cannot be achieved, and an option to purchase reduced sets of content/unbundling.

What is this likely to mean for UC?
We are waiting to see what will happen as a result of the conversations CAUL is having with the publishers.  I currently expect we will be updated again in early June.  CAUL is meeting with several publishers for initial meetings and they are awaiting first offers.  We are expecting that there will be a variety of responses from the publishers.

In other parts of the world, some universities and/or consortia have not reached agreement with publishers over a way forward.  The experience of the University of California was ending negotiations with Elsevier in February 2019 and resuming negotiations in July 2020.  They finally announced a 4 year open access publishing agreement with Elsevier in March 2021.

Along with other libraries around the world, we are considering alternate options to the big package deal.  SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) have begun documenting examples including several where libraries are taking up à la carte options instead of packages and achieving savings as a result.  We at UC have taken out a subscription to Unsub which is a tool that can help libraries identify alternate options to packages including open access, document delivery and access to purchased backfiles.

Here in LAC we have begun using Unsub to identify scenarios for package alternatives that we could discuss at UC and will share our insights in the near future.