Has anybody else been struggling trying to figure out what to do about their American Chemical Society journal subscriptions?  We had been subscribed to nine titles costing us around $18,000 p/yr, already some of our costliest titles.  Also the titles are underutilized; we maintain our subscriptions to them  at the Chemestry department's request to fulfill requirements for accredation (and American Chemical Society is the accrediting body, do I sense a conflict of interest here?).

Generally it seems that most of the subscription charges for our periodicals have risen only modestly, if at all,  for 2011, due in part to low inflation and deminished library funding for subscriptions, as library budgets are shrinking.  This however is not the case with our Amdrican Chemical Society subscriptions. The subscription charges for these same 9 titles have gone up from $18,000 to $23,000 per year for 2011.  The only thing my Rep can offer is a deal to provide more ACS journal subscriptions at a slightly higher rate, which of course does not address the problem that we cannot afford the subscriptions we currently have with ACS, let alone any additional costs.

We have canceled our subscriptions to about a third of the titles we subscribed to in the previous year to keep costs under control.  Has anyone faced these same issues?  What else have people done to resolve this problem?  I would be very interested to hear what other kinds of stategies serials department directors have come up with in the face of these rising costs.

Mark Ferguson

Periodicals Librarian, College of Saint Elizabeth