The advocacy organisation SPARC recently arranged a webinar showing four North American libraries’Â experiences in moving away from so called ‘big deals.’ These licencing arrangements bundles lots of journals together in big packages rather than selling journals separately
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ9onZEUKw8
There were many interesting things to digest, particularly in how these libraries still managed to provide access to content researchers needed to get to despite have no subscription with the publisher
In particular
1) These libraries saved a lot of money. By cancelling its contract with Elsevier, MIT saved 2.7m USD per year and spend only 300k USD in providing access to articles via other means. Without significant opposition from faculty.
2) The importance of doing this ‘with faculty’, and not ‘to faculty’. The process of working with the research community and making this a shared endeavour was vital. Without communication and cooperation, the resistance in universities would have been much higher.
3) The context in the Netherlands is different. The Dutch large-scale deals are read and publish, whereas MIT etc are talking about unbundling deals that are read-only. Taking a new approach in the Netherlands is not only about rethinking the read part of these deals, but the publish part of our deals as well.
4) Secondly, in the Netherlands the large deals are all via the library consortium UKB, and managed by Surf. Working in a consortium provides economic benefits for members, but it also makes changes more difficult. Buy in is needed across the universities.