From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2013 10:42:48 +0100 Deborah wrote: "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." One of the many ironies of the scholarly communications market is the fact that libraries are penalised for putting in place effective discoverymmechanisms. Our institutions invest considerable time and money making sure that researchers and students can find the material that we pay for. Then (some) publishers turn to us and say 'Ah, your usage is increasing, clearly it's time for us to put up the price'. A library that has effectively enabled discovery sees greater use and reduced costs per download, and so is considered by (some) publishers to be 'underpaying' compared to other libraries that have not enabled discovery - so leading to an increase in the total price paid. David On 2 Aug 2013, at 01:23, LIBLICENSE wrote: 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]