Scientists created a rod for their backs when they allowed the journals in which their work is published to become…

Because they were spaced almost a full year apart, I really did not connect the dots when two Canadian universities announced that they were cancelling their “Big Deals” with John Wiley & Sons publisher.  The Times Higher Education reported on the decision at the University of Montreal back in January 2014, while the announcement made … Continue reading Cancelling Wiley? →

Basic financials on big pigs in scholcomm, textbooks, trade publishing.

France may not have any money left for its universities but it does have money for academic publishers. While university presidents learn that their funding is to be reduced by EUR 400 million, the…

So what do I mean by Big Deals.

FOIA in the UK.

The latest forecast on Elsevier.

Last year, Walt Crawford self-published a book entitled The Big Deal and the Damage Done (which I wrote about here). In it, he analyzed statistics for academic library budgets and showed that Big Deals for serials were gradually taking over many library budgets as serial expenditures rose significantly more than inflation and the inflexibility of the subscription packages led libraries to cut expenditures for books and other materials. This year, Crawford published a revised and expanded report on the topic as the May/June volume of the ALA Library Technology Reports: “Big-Deal Serial Purchasing: Tracking the Damage,” in which he analyzes the “Academic Library Data Files” from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

Nice infographic.

Economists reveal surprising variety in prices charged for journal bundles by three major academic publishers

Little is known about the prices that universities pay for bundled access to the journals published by large commercial publishers. Publishers have insisted that libraries sign confidentiality clauses that keep these prices secret. We used Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain copies of the contracts signed by a large number of institutions. We report the results of this investigation and compare the bundled subscription prices charged by for-profit and nonprofit publishers.  Large commercial publishers sell bundled online subscriptions to their entire list of academic journals at prices significantly lower than the sum of their á la carte prices. Bundle prices differ drastically between institutions, but they are not publicly posted. The data that we have collected enable us to compare the bundle prices charged by commercial publishers with those of nonprofit societies and to examine the types of price discrimination practiced by commercial and nonprofit journal publishers. This information is of interest to economists who study monopolist pricing, librarians interested in making efficient use of library budgets, and scholars who are interested in the availability of the work that they publish.

Universität Konstanz

How much is too much? For all the talk that the publishers of major journals such as Science, Nature and the Lancet are charging too much for their wares, it seems a limit has been reached. French universities, in particular, have had enough and are just saying “non!” and cancelling their journal subscriptions. Is this the wake-up call the big publishers need? Should other universities follow suit, researchers organise a wider boycott, or is there another way to make the journal oligarchs realise that enough is enough?

Universite de Montreal explains its decision to cancel the living crap out of a Wiley Big Deal.

Ah yes, the Big Deal, in which many many many titles are bundled and sold to libraries. Usually it's journals in databases, but sometimes...