From: Deborah Lenares <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2013 08:11:22 -0400

I agree that each institution should assess the cost per use of their
journal subscriptions including Big Deals to determine if PPV is a
good option for them.  However in some cases the Big Deal is actually
quite a good deal.

We did PPV with a major publisher for nearly four years.  It was an
excellent approach to expand access.  In 2012, after three years of
slowly rising use, our use exploded in the spring semester.  We saw
similar use patterns with other publishers, though not all.  I believe
two factors impacted greatly increased use: the deployment of Summon
as our discovery layer the year before, and the adoption of tablets,
which allow our users to download and store a nearly limitless number
of articles.

We decided not to fund additional PPV for the rest of the year, and
provided articles through ILL only.  We negotiated a Big Deal with
this publisher for 2013 access, which we are very satisfied with.

So there's my cautionary tale about PPV.

But back to the original question: APS journals.  We dropped the
APS-All package years ago because the cost per use did not make sense
for our institution.  Over the past five years, which has included
much heated discussion with the physics faculty, we've reduced our APS
subscription to only 2 or 3 because of very high cost and fairly low
use.  I have tried to discuss the situation with APS to no avail.

I believe the root of this problem, with APS and ACS (although we find
ACS to be a good value), is that societies are funding activities
through journal subscriptions.  Are societies seeing decreased
membership, thus increasing the need for revenue from subscriptions?
This is something that librarians and society publishers should be
discussing.

Best,
Deborah Lenares

Manager Acquisitions and Resource Sharing
Science Collection Management Librarian
Clapp Library - Wellesley College
106 Central Street, Wellesley, Massachusetts 02481
781-283-3596        [log in to unmask]


On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 5:23 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Steve Oberg <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 22:12:16 +0000
>
> > However the case does highlight the way in which bundled pricing no
> > longer reflects the financial or academic situation in universities
> > today.
>
> One reaction I have to this thread is to suggest that collectively, a
> closer examination be given to institutional pay-per-view (PPV) rather
> than subscriptions to bundles. My institution began this process more
> than two years ago in response to the reality that approximately one
> out of every four dollars of our entire acquisitions budget was going
> to three large publishers and their bundles/deals. Admittedly we are a
> small institution and our budget pales in comparison to many others.
> It is very important to judge this option, and others, in the context
> of the local environment. But the basic premise is, no more big deals
> or packages, period. This is a far more radical and, I suggest,
> user-focused demand driven content outlook than most PDA/DDA
> discussions, which focus mainly on e-books or print monographs.
>
> We have institutional PPV set up for three major publishers; for two
> of them, there is literally no visible difference to our users when
> accessing this content vs. journals for which we have subscriptions.
> That's by design. As a result, we have seen very strong usage growth
> among a greatly expanded universe of available journal articles in
> full text than we could ever have afforded to provide previously. Is
> this model risky? Are there specific details to flesh out to
> understand what exactly this entails? Yes, of course. But we faced
> even greater risk by continuing the traditional way. We now have far
> more journal content available for less cost. We are in discussions
> with other journal publishers to explore expansion of this approach.
> The message we convey to publishers is, something is better than
> nothing. If an individual journal or a package subscription at a high
> price is all they will offer, we are not interested and they will get
> nothing. But if they will work with us to enable institutional PPV,
> they will get something, a revenue stream.
>
> Steve
>
> Steve Oberg
> Assistant Professor
> Electronic Resources and Serials
> Buswell Memorial Library
> Wheaton College
> Wheaton, IL  60187