It has long argued that the cost of access to scholarly and periodicals was rising at an unsustainable rate. Here is confirmation of the fact.

Recent budgetary cutbacks in the Province of Quebec have led the director of libraries at the Université de Montréal (disclosure: my university) to refuse to renew the "Big Deal" with Wiley. The publisher has responded by rather drastic price offers and absurd arguments (as you will be able to read below). In effect - and this is a new one for me - your subscription rates with a publisher may depend on how long a faithful customer you have been. In other words, if you are not a good boy or a good girl, we shall punish you. In the airplane industry, I had heard of frequent travellers enjoying free or cheap upgrades, but I had never heard that less frequent travellers had to pay more for their seats! Are publishers even worse than airlines?

I have translated the French-language announcement that is available on the site of our libraries and which you can check for yourself if Molière's tongue is not too esoteric for you. The URL is http://www.bib.umontreal.ca/communiques/20140115-DB-annulation-periodiques-wiley.htm

One conclusion emerges immediately: confidentiality clauses are something to be rejected generally, as a collective move to put the publishers on notice that the advantage of the panoptic position is not theirs alone. The prisoner's dilemma is not to be accepted.

The second thing to mention is that the director of our libraries is going to need all the support he can get from both within the university (and he has it here) and across all universities, especially ARL universities. I should hope that messages of support and ideas as to tactics, as well as sharing of similar experiments may converge toward him at [log in to unmask] . Canadian librarians, in particular, should quickly show their full support for the courageous move of our Library Director.

Here is the announcement aimed at the university community that came out last afternoon and which I translated this morning:

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January 14th, 2014. Out of 1510 periodicals in the Wiley Online Library, the Université de Montréal is cancelling subscriptions to 1142 titles at the end of January. As a result, and from this point on, the articles found in the cancelled titles will no longer be available on-line. However, access to earlier issues will be entirely maintained.

This action results from a process that started a long while ago. The financial cut-backs imposed by the Québec government only accelerated the decision process. The result of the analysis is simple: libraries have been driven to the wall because of the yearly rise of subscriptions to periodicals that hover between 3% and 6%. They cannot go on cutting back the acquisition of monographs to compensate for such price increases. As a result, this conclusion, as well as the adopted solution, would have been the same a few years down the line, independently of the financial context.

Please note that libraries at McGill University also subscribe to the periodicals owned by John Wiley &Sons. In 2014, the Université de Montréal pays as much as McGill but can access only 368 periodicals while McGill benefits from full access to the 1510 titles in the Wiley collection. The publisher refuses to grant us the same conditions as McGill because – such is the pretext - McGill has subscribed to the Wiley Online Library longer. If, this year,the Université de Montréal wanted access to the full collection, it would have to add $243,000(Canadian) to what McGill pays despite the fact that usage of Wiley periodicals at the Université de Montréal is 45% lower than at McGill.

The unique characteristics of each periodical is what has allowed publishers, for several years, to hold its university customers captive.Publishers can set prices at will, and do so all the more easily that the market is concentrated in the hands of 5 multinational companies. Stéphanie Gagnon, Head of collections at the Université de Montréal, explains that “John Wiley & Sons is one of the multinationals with which we must deal”.

Since 1986, in the larger universities of North America, the acquisition budget for periodicals has grown four times as fast as inflation. The pace of these increases is unsustainable and a crisis cannot be avoided. This reasoning has brought the Administration of the Libraries at the Université de Montréal to begin a campaign aiming at increasing the university community's consciousness in this regard.

Louise Béliveau, Vice-President (students and sustainable development) of the Université de Montréal believes that “the research community must rally together if better financial conditions are to be obtained: few publishers will take the chance that a revolt might deprive them of their raw materials and a free work force. Yet, it is clear that libraries alone will not succeed because they simply do not carry the weight of the publishers' oligopoly.”

The Administration of the libraries is fully conscious that such cancellations will impact teaching and research: the maintained subscriptions correspond to 71.4% of use in 2012. To alleviate this situation a little, the $3.00 fee for inter-library loans of articles is cancelled.

In the coming months, Professor Vincent Larivière, an expert in bibliometrics and infometrics who holds a Research Chair in our School of Library and Information Science, will work on refining the methodology used to select periodicals. This will be followed by a broad consultation of researchers which, in 2015, will likely lead to various decision updates.

In Summary

• In 2012, John Wiley & Sons has announced profits amounting to $437 millions of dollars out of a total revenue stream of 1 billion dollars.
  
  
• In our university, financial cutbacks imposed by the Québec Government have translated into decreases in acquisition in 2012-3 and 2013-4.
  
  
• The libraries at the Université de Montréal will renew their subscriptions to 368 periodicals (out of the 1510 titles that make up the full collection of Wiley Online Library). For the same cost, McGill University has access to the full collection.
  
  
• Wiley Periodicals that have been published before 2014 will remain accessible.
  
  
• The subscriptions that have been maintained correspond to 71.4% of use in 2012.
  
  
• Periodical articles can be ordered through Inter-library loans (ILS). Delivery is done by e-mail and within five business days. The $3 fee is cancelled to soften the impact of cancellations.
  
  
• The method used to select titles will be refined and will be followed by a consultation of researchers. The list of titles that are maintained will be modified accordingly.

A line has to be drawn in the sand!

Jean-Claude Guédon

Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal