Collections Cuts – 2021
This year, the campus is facing the task of reducing our journal costs by $1.2 million for FY2021. This amounts to a 20% reduction, which is compounded by additional subscription cuts at the UM System level. These cuts are necessary due to journal price increases. To stay within our budget, we needed to cancel our “big deals” with Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Oxford and Sage publishers.
The $1.2M campus level cut (20%) fell heavily on the health sciences, since so many of our top journals are in the hands of these 5 publishers.
List prices to subscribe to all 2885 of their health sciences journals amounts to about $4.5 million dollars a year. We had less than ¼ that amount to spend on them.
We took a data-driven approach to these painful cuts, focusing on maintaining access to as many as possible of the 800+ health sciences journals you viewed at least 100 times in 2019. Journals which cost over $1500 were subject to additional scrutiny.
We used a variety of tactics to stretch our money as far as possible:
- Emphasized access over ownership:
- We converted about 600 of our journal subscriptions from an ownership to a rental plan to avoid losing access.
- For a small number of non-clinical titles, our rental subscriptions may not provide access to the very the latest issues. We will have to rely on interlibrary loan to get very recent articles.
- We will be relying on pay-per-view and interlibrary loan for access to expensive low use journals, especially if much of the content is free after a year.
- We converted about 600 of our journal subscriptions from an ownership to a rental plan to avoid losing access.
- Cancelled about $80,000 in subscriptions to high cost/low use/low impact factor journals from other publishers to maintain access to as many of the top tier, heavily used journals as possible from these 5 publishers.