The vision of our university calls on each of us to advance the ideals of exploration, critical thinking, connection, and creativity. Collectively, we seek to provide a transformational educational experience for our students, grounded in innovative scholarship, research, and creative activity; as well as justice and equity in our policies, practices, and impacts. Through these efforts, we hope to address the world’s most challenging problems, questions, and needs. The heart of the Western Libraries’ mission is one and the same: to advance these goals, connecting people to the resources, expertise, and spaces necessary for impactful teaching and lifelong learning, while advancing equitable and inclusive access to information in all its forms.
In this spirit, the Western Libraries continues to move forward in new directions, favoring broad access to information over more traditional models of ownership, challenging the narrative that knowledge can be owned, and seeking ways to keep information open to the community where it can best serve the greater good. We are not alone in these efforts: libraries around the world are pushing for a more sustainable, open, and just approach to information, and the current moment represents an opportunity for all of us. Over the next year, the Libraries will be engaging the university in important conversations about our collective mission, the information landscape, and the implications for library collections.
In the long-term, the proliferation of journal titles, rising costs of library subscriptions, and for-profit journal landscape require a more forward-looking conversation about scholarly publishing. Western has the opportunity to be part of these important discussions; read more about Open Access and the future of scholarly communications below.
Short-Term: Subscription Reductions Process
This winter the Libraries will be asking for university-wide feedback on a list of potential subscription cancellations.
Methodology
This list was compiled by the Western Libraries Subscription Task Force after evaluating 400+ subscriptions based on a variety of quantitative and qualitative criteria, including: cost per use, average annual cost increase, reliance of an individual college on the resource, the number of users supported by the resource, vendor privacy policies, duplication or overlap with other resources, accessibility of the interface to users with disabilities, digital rights management restrictions, limitations on the number of users, use for course reserves, availability through interlibrary loan, discoverability through OneSearch, and the vendor commitment to Open Access. (A more detailed description of the criteria and scoring methodology is available in the Subscription Task Force’s interim report.) We hope that by capturing a more nuanced picture of “value,” this methodology will provide a better starting point for cancellation discussions than cost-per-use alone.
Departmental Input
The candidate titles include roughly 250 journals, databases, and e-book packages, and currently add up to more than the $330K needed to balance the subscription budget. The list will be distributed for university review in early February and departments will be asked to submit coordinated responses by early March. We strongly encourage all faculty to participate in order to ensure that our path forward adequately reflects the needs and values of every discipline, college, and department. Departments may submit unlimited retention requests, with the understanding that the Task Force only has a margin of $50K-$75K with which to meet requests across the entire university. To help the Task Force manage these requests, Departments will be required to rank all retention requests in priority order.
New to this year’s subscription reduction process, departments will be allowed to submit requests for new subscriptions in addition to retention requests. Any new subscriptions must be incorporated into the same priority ranking as retention requests since everything will ultimately come out of the same $50K-$75K margin.
The Task Force will rely on departments’ request rankings as one factor in the process of fine-tuning any cancellation recommendations. The Task Force will also be looking at the distribution of subscription expenditures across colleges, and seeking (as much as possible) to recommend a final list of cancellations that results in equitable spending across disciplines. This year, in order to distribute spending more equitably--and because of the number of STEM resources likely to be on the review list--the Task Force may need to prioritize STEM retention requests over those of other disciplines. In subsequent years, as different journal packages come up for renewal, this prioritization is likely to shift. Nevertheless, our goal will always be equity and transparency, and we ask that the university bear with us through what we expect to be multiple years of subscription reductions.
Other Feedback and Next Steps
To help guide the university through this process, the Western Libraries Subscription Task Force will be hosting two open forums in February: on Wednesday, February 12, at 4pm, and one on Thursday, February 27, at 4pm. Both forums will be held in Haggard Hall 253, which is accessible via the High Street entrance to the building. The Task Force is also available to meet with any interested department, college, or group, to answer questions and hear your feedback. If you would like us to visit your department or college, please work with your chair and we will coordinate a time; or, reach out to Task Force chair, Madeline Kelly.
In March, the Task Force will develop recommendations based on the total feedback. These recommendations will be reviewed by the Libraries’ Scholarly Resources Group and both the Senate Library Committee and UPRC, before being submitted to Libraries Administration for a final decision in May. Following the cancellation process, Summit and interlibrary loan will continue to provide access to materials for which Western does not have a subscription.
Long-Term: Scholarly Publishing and Open Access
The broader context of current events makes any conversation about subscription reductions a timely one. On February 28, the University of California announced that they were terminating journal negotiations with the scholarly publishing giant Elsevier, walking away from more than 2,500 journal titles and $50 million in expenditures. At the heart of the decision: a growing tension between researchers’ desire for scholarship to be openly available and the starkly contrasting reality of skyrocketing journal costs and article paywalls. Add to this the fact that publishers increasingly lock their journals into massive “big deal” packages, and the result is an ideological and financial crisis. As researchers and libraries around the world strive toward the broadest possible access to information, rising publisher prices and content restrictions threaten the very integrity and inclusivity of our scholarly conversations.
UC’s decision to stand firm follows on the heels of similar negotiations in Germany and Sweden, and echoes a trend among academic institutions—including R1 universities like Cornell, Florida State, University of Iowa, and others—to break large journal packages. UC’s decision is one of boldest and most prominent in recent years, and since February other universities (including Duke University, the University of Minnesota, the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, the University of Oregon, and the University of Virginia) have weighed in, issuing statements acknowledging the magnitude of the moment. Meanwhile, the European Commission and eleven European nations recently committed to making all scientific studies funded by public resources freely available via Open Access by 2020.
Here at Western, we are part of the broader scholarly ecosystem and have an opportunity to help shape the future of publishing, libraries, and research. To that end, the Libraries will be working with the university community, via the Senate Library Committee, the Subscription Task Force, and the Libraries’ Scholarly Communications Librarian, to explore our own future.
Throughout the next six months, the Task Force will strive to work transparently and consultatively, and will continue to communicate updates via this site, the Library News and Western Today, department chairs and faculty governance, leadership groups like the AS Board and the Graduate Student Advisory Council, all-faculty emails, and the Libraries’ subject teams.
We appreciate your feedback and look forward to a robust conversation about the future of publishing, scholarly communication, and library subscriptions! Remember: Western is not alone in this struggle. Universities across the country and around the world are grappling with unsustainable subscription pricing and engaging in serious conversations about the future of scholarly publishing. We hope that Western will be part of those conversations, as well.
For more information on how the Libraries manages subscriptions, consult the Subscription Management Glossary and FAQ. For more information on Open Access and the scholarly publishing ecosystem, review the SPARC Open Access page, which includes a downloadable Open Access fact sheet. You can also contact Task Force chair, Madeline Kelly.
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