Just out of curiosity, has anyone compared the subscription rate increases for any given time period for journals published by commercial publishers versus journals published by societies?

Wendy Helmstetter

Director, Resources and Services

Evans Library

Florida Institute of Technology

whelmste@fit.edu

From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu] On Behalf Of Gracemary Smulewitz
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2011 12:49 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] Moving to print

Hi Marilyn,

I agree, you do what you have to do.  We have not reverted back to print and I don't think we ever will given users expectations, the linking environment and the growth of distance education programs.  We have analyzed whether it is less expensive to buy individual titles outside of a package and have not found that practice to yield a significant cost savings unless the cuts were extremely drastic.  

In recent years we have taken a holistic approach to reducing our spend.  You may already have taken  many or all of these actions but if not, they may help. 

We looked at areas that traditionally were automatically renewed and made changes. We considered our subscriptions for annuals,  including reference material,  and changed many from subscriptions to firm orders on a need basis.  We don't automatically renew an annual subscription now , the title is reviewed by a selector and a decision is made regarding yearly access .  This may mean that we skip a few years before ordering. 

We have also looked at subscriptions that are irregular and coded them differently in our budget system.  If they are published less frequently than annually, the money encumbered for them can be used.

We are tracking cash flow and determining at what point we can use money allocated for  particular resources for other things, mostly at years end.  This includes prepayments.

We reviewed a policy about keeping print if the online title was only offered by an aggregator and was embargoed , and have canceled the print wherever possible.


We have negotiated on everything related to an online resource where possible, from inflation rate to simultaneous users.  We have pulled apart all packages and looked for duplication, and negotiated on that as well. Lastly, we are looking at usage stats for everything and incorporating that into our negotiations for pricing. 

I have to say that we are working harder then we ever have, we are improving everyone's skills on these matters and it is is all very interesting.  More importantly it seems to be helping.

Gracemary


--
Gracemary Smulewitz
Head, Distributed Technical Services

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
169 College Avenue
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901
email:   smulewi@rulmail.rutgers.edu
phone: 732-932-7388 ext 161
fax:      732-932-8141