SLAYING THE DRAGON WITH THE LONG TAIL:UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS LIBRARIES’ DECISION TO BREAK THE BIG DEAL WITH ELSEVIER
Steven A. Knowlton, Collection Development Librarian(assisted by James R. Rodgers and Matthew J. Jabaily)ASERL Fall 2015 Membership Meeting, New OrleansNovember 19, 2015
FLAT BUDGET – RISING SUBSCRIPTION COSTS
$-
$1,000,000
$2,000,000
$3,000,000
Elsevier as a Portion of Total Materials Budget, 2005-2014
ELSEVIER TOTAL BUDGET
FREEDOM COLLECTION – THE “BIG DEAL” TBR-wide agreement:
UofM maintains 288 subs (other libraries maintain 2005 title list)
Discount from “list price” Discounted “content fee” Must maintain amount of spending
– allowed to swap titles on subscription list
Multi-year contract with other Tennessee Board of Regents universities
Pay an additional fee equivalent to 10% of entire expenditure
Enjoy access to most other titles published by Elsevier (around 2800 titles)
THE “LONG TAIL”Anderson (2004): A few titles will have most of the use. The rest of the titles will exhibit smaller amounts of use.
This parallels other phenomena such as a Bradford distribution and the Pareto principle (80/20 rule).
The Freedom Collection has a very long tail.
THE “LONG TAIL”DO
WNL
OADS
NUMBER OF TITLES
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 8000
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1000
DIRECT SUBS ADDITIONAL TITLES
USAGE BY YEAR-OF-PUBLICATION
ADJUSTED COST-PER-USE
Traditional Cost-per-Use:Subscription Price divided by all uses
Adjusted Cost-per-Use:Subscription Price divided by just those uses not available through perpetual access or other mean (Open Access, aggregated databases)
TITLE2014 Price All Use Paid Use CPU ACPU
Addiction $3,436.44 227 0 $15.14 $3,436.44!Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications $3,343.23 13 1 $257.17 $3,343.23Psychology & Marketing $2,288.96 70 19 $32.70 $2,288.96Machine Learning $2,376.28 17 1 $139.78 $2,376.28Journal of Financial Services Research $1,669.06 12 2 $139.09 $834.53Climatic Change $5,252.93 49 11 $107.20 $477.54Journal of Applied Ecology $1,772.64 22 5 $80.57 $354.53Mean of 32 Journals $3,460.22 69.2 32.2 $764.74 $1,628.44 Median of 32 Journals $2,974.89 17 7 $139.09 $500.16
TRADITIONAL VS. ADJUSTED COST-PER-USE
USAGE BY YEAR-OF-PUBLICATION
TITLE Perpetual Access?
Avg Annual Usage
Sub Price 2016
Traditional CPU
Expected % Paid Usage 2016
EST. PAID USAGES IN 2016
Adjusted CPU
Journal A
NO 154 $899.40 $5.84 100% 154 $5.84
Journal B
YES 208 $587.69 $2.82 19% 38.48 $15.27
ADJUSTED COST-PER-USE
HOW THIS INFORMATION HELPSWe settled on a number we are willing to payUsed the adjusted cost-per-use figures to identify the titles with the best valueNote: a lot of the highest-use titles fell out of the list, because so much of the use was from older content
Added up the highest-ranked titles until we hit our target number
OLD PACKAGE NEW PLAN0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
450
500
283
28
4000
136
DIRECT SUBS ADDITIONAL TITLES
NUM
BER
OF T
ITLE
S2800 2800
DIRECT SUBS ADDITIONAL TITLES0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
45000
34745
41925USAGE WITH THE BIG DEAL
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
45000
4691
25425
30116
37501
PROJECTED USAGE WITH JUST DIRECT SUBS
FULL
-TEX
T DO
WNL
OADS
FULL
-TEX
T DO
WNL
OADS
FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS
The usage available through perpetual access will decline as the last year of P.A. recedes
Will need to revisit the title list every couple years to ensure maximum content availability
Possible increase in ILL costs