Comments on: Is the Big Deal Unsustainable? http://www.against-the-grain.com/2011/05/is-the-big-deal-unsustainable/ Linking librarians, publishers and vendors Sat, 18 May 2013 19:36:22 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 By: Joseph J. Esposito http://www.against-the-grain.com/2011/05/is-the-big-deal-unsustainable/comment-page-1/#comment-30922 Joseph J. Esposito Tue, 03 May 2011 13:34:58 +0000 http://www.against-the-grain.com/?p=4938#comment-30922 I would be very interested to get some hard data on these issues. How many Big Deals have in fact been cancelled (as distinct from those under review)? How are the publishers whose Big Deals have been cancelled responding? How is the money saved by cancelling a Big Deal being spent, or is it simply going into the bucket with all the other reduced expenditures? How will libraries respond to the reduced number of publications when a Big Deal has been cancelled? And if a Big Deal has been cancelled, which individual journals have then been subscribed to that formerly were part of the Big Deal? Joe Esposito I would be very interested to get some hard data on these issues. How many Big Deals have in fact been cancelled (as distinct from those under review)? How are the publishers whose Big Deals have been cancelled responding? How is the money saved by cancelling a Big Deal being spent, or is it simply going into the bucket with all the other reduced expenditures? How will libraries respond to the reduced number of publications when a Big Deal has been cancelled? And if a Big Deal has been cancelled, which individual journals have then been subscribed to that formerly were part of the Big Deal?

Joe Esposito

]]> By: Rick Anderson http://www.against-the-grain.com/2011/05/is-the-big-deal-unsustainable/comment-page-1/#comment-30899 Rick Anderson Tue, 03 May 2011 01:38:22 +0000 http://www.against-the-grain.com/?p=4938#comment-30899 Sustainability is not a function of access model; it's a function of price. If your Big Deal is going to eat a larger and larger portion of your materials budget from year to year, then it is by definition unsustainable -- the year will eventually come when it eats all of your budget, and the following year it will outstrip your budget. Boom! It can no longer be sustained. On the other hand, ILL (or any other per-article acquisition model) will also be unsustainable if the per-article price is so high that you can't afford to buy all the articles your patrons need. The difference is that you can ration articles; you can't ration access to the Big Deal. Nobody likes rationing, of course, but it's what we do every day -- we decide to subscribe to this journal and not that one, or we cancel a subscription that we wish we could keep because the price of that journal (or other, more essential ones) has gone up to the point that we can't keep paying for it. So here's the bottom line: as long as the cost of access to journal content keeps increasing at a rate higher than the rate of increase for serials budgets, you have an unsustainable situation, no matter what acquisition model you choose. Access will deteriorate at the rate of difference between budget increase and price increase. That's not a value judgment on particular models or libraries or publishers; it's a simple observation of financial reality. Sustainability is not a function of access model; it’s a function of price. If your Big Deal is going to eat a larger and larger portion of your materials budget from year to year, then it is by definition unsustainable — the year will eventually come when it eats all of your budget, and the following year it will outstrip your budget. Boom! It can no longer be sustained.

On the other hand, ILL (or any other per-article acquisition model) will also be unsustainable if the per-article price is so high that you can’t afford to buy all the articles your patrons need. The difference is that you can ration articles; you can’t ration access to the Big Deal. Nobody likes rationing, of course, but it’s what we do every day — we decide to subscribe to this journal and not that one, or we cancel a subscription that we wish we could keep because the price of that journal (or other, more essential ones) has gone up to the point that we can’t keep paying for it.

So here’s the bottom line: as long as the cost of access to journal content keeps increasing at a rate higher than the rate of increase for serials budgets, you have an unsustainable situation, no matter what acquisition model you choose. Access will deteriorate at the rate of difference between budget increase and price increase. That’s not a value judgment on particular models or libraries or publishers; it’s a simple observation of financial reality.

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