SLAYING THE DRAGON WITH THE LONG TAIL:UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS LIBRARIES’ DECISION TO BREAK THE BIG DEAL WITH ELSEVIER

Steven A. Knowlton, Collection Development Librarian(assisted by James R. Rodgers and Matthew J. Jabaily)ASERL Fall 2015 Membership Meeting, New OrleansNovember 19, 2015

FLAT BUDGET – RISING SUBSCRIPTION COSTS

$-

$1,000,000

$2,000,000

$3,000,000

Elsevier as a Portion of Total Materials Budget, 2005-2014

ELSEVIER TOTAL BUDGET

FREEDOM COLLECTION – THE “BIG DEAL” TBR-wide agreement:

UofM maintains 288 subs (other libraries maintain 2005 title list)

Discount from “list price” Discounted “content fee” Must maintain amount of spending

– allowed to swap titles on subscription list

Multi-year contract with other Tennessee Board of Regents universities

Pay an additional fee equivalent to 10% of entire expenditure

Enjoy access to most other titles published by Elsevier (around 2800 titles)

THE “LONG TAIL”Anderson (2004): A few titles will have most of the use. The rest of the titles will exhibit smaller amounts of use.

This parallels other phenomena such as a Bradford distribution and the Pareto principle (80/20 rule).

The Freedom Collection has a very long tail.

THE “LONG TAIL”DO

WNL

OADS

NUMBER OF TITLES

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 8000

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1000

DIRECT SUBS ADDITIONAL TITLES

USAGE BY YEAR-OF-PUBLICATION

ADJUSTED COST-PER-USE

Traditional Cost-per-Use:Subscription Price divided by all uses

Adjusted Cost-per-Use:Subscription Price divided by just those uses not available through perpetual access or other mean (Open Access, aggregated databases)

TITLE2014 Price All Use Paid Use CPU ACPU   

Addiction $3,436.44 227 0 $15.14 $3,436.44!Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications $3,343.23 13 1 $257.17 $3,343.23Psychology & Marketing $2,288.96 70 19 $32.70 $2,288.96Machine Learning $2,376.28 17 1 $139.78 $2,376.28Journal of Financial Services Research $1,669.06 12 2 $139.09 $834.53Climatic Change $5,252.93 49 11 $107.20 $477.54Journal of Applied Ecology $1,772.64 22 5 $80.57 $354.53Mean of 32 Journals $3,460.22 69.2 32.2 $764.74 $1,628.44 Median of 32 Journals $2,974.89 17 7 $139.09 $500.16

TRADITIONAL VS. ADJUSTED COST-PER-USE

USAGE BY YEAR-OF-PUBLICATION

TITLE   Perpetual Access?

Avg Annual Usage

Sub Price 2016

Traditional CPU

Expected % Paid Usage 2016

EST. PAID USAGES IN 2016

Adjusted CPU

Journal A

NO 154 $899.40 $5.84 100% 154 $5.84

Journal B

YES 208 $587.69 $2.82 19% 38.48 $15.27

ADJUSTED COST-PER-USE

HOW THIS INFORMATION HELPSWe settled on a number we are willing to payUsed the adjusted cost-per-use figures to identify the titles with the best valueNote: a lot of the highest-use titles fell out of the list, because so much of the use was from older content

Added up the highest-ranked titles until we hit our target number

OLD PACKAGE NEW PLAN0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

500

283

28

4000

136

DIRECT SUBS ADDITIONAL TITLES

NUM

BER

OF T

ITLE

S2800 2800

DIRECT SUBS ADDITIONAL TITLES0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

35000

40000

45000

34745

41925USAGE WITH THE BIG DEAL

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

35000

40000

45000

4691

25425

30116

37501

PROJECTED USAGE WITH JUST DIRECT SUBS

FULL

-TEX

T DO

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FULL

-TEX

T DO

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FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS

The usage available through perpetual access will decline as the last year of P.A. recedes

Will need to revisit the title list every couple years to ensure maximum content availability

Possible increase in ILL costs