It’s Not You, It’s Me: Breaking Up with Perpetual Access

Abstract

Perpetual access to electronic journals is viewed as an important investment for libraries that have canceled and discarded their print journals, or that fear losing access to online journals. But does perpetual access really matter? In 2011 the Collection Services division at Concordia University Libraries in Montreal, Quebec, undertook an extensive review of usage statistics for our Elsevier journals. The original goal was to identify low‐use journals in our core collection in order to swap them for high‐use titles from the ScienceDirect Freedom Collection, thereby gaining perpetual access to those titles most used by researchers. The exercise produced some interesting results, and prompted collections librarians to question the actual value of perpetual access journal rights. Data and Analysis Concordia University Libraries subscribe to Elsevier journals through the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) consortium. Similar agreements exist with other consortiums and libraries in North America and globally. With just about 2100 journals, Elsevier is the largest ”big deal” package that our library has through CRKN. It is also the single largest expenditure on our electronic resources budget, making up approximately 17% of our total expenditures for electronic resources. Given that Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) disciplines, with the exception of Engineering, are not Concordia’s strength, this is a substantial budget commitment. However, overall usage of Elsevier journals at Concordia has always been very good. Due to the improvement of our ERM infrastructure, specifically the implementation of an ERM system in 2008 and the loading of e‐ journal holdings into our online catalogue, we have seen some significant increases in usage of Elsevier journals over the last four years. As a result, we consider this expenditure a very good investment. In order to set the stage for the subsequent usage analysis, we need to highlight certain conditions of the license agreement. Essentially, Elsevier specifies a list of journals that are Concordia’s ‘core holdings’. These are journals that we subscribed to individually when we first entered the CRKN agreement in 2004, as well as additional journals that have since transferred to Elsevier. As part of the agreement, we are committed to uphold these subscriptions and, importantly, we will retain perpetual access to these journals in case we discontinue our participation in the agreement. In addition, against a proportional fee we get access to most other Elsevier journal titles, the so‐called ScienceDirect Freedom Collection. In case we discontinue our participation in the CRKN agreement we would not have access to any of these journals that are now part of the Freedom Collection. Annually, Elsevier offers a title swap option. This allows participants to drop titles from their core journal lists, presumably those titles that see very little use, and exchange them for high‐use titles from the Freedom Collection. The benefit is to obtain perpetual access rights to content that is evidently more used. In a limited way, it gives libraries the opportunity to perform some form of collection development in this big deal package. Our usage analysis included all 2100 journal titles that are part of the Elsevier ScienceDirect journal package. 148 of these journals are our current core holdings. The remaining titles and large majority make up the Freedom Collection. We collected COUNTER usage statistics from Elsevier for four consecutive years, 2007‐2010, and our examination relied specifically on data from Journal Report 1, which provides the “Number of Successful Full‐Text Article Requests by Month and Journal”. We compiled the YTD totals for each journal into one single spreadsheet and highlighted those rows in the spreadsheet that listed our core journal. By using the sort and filter functions of Excel we looked at the spreadsheet data to examine how our core journals were comparing to the overall usage in this package. We were pleasantly surprised to find the great majority of our core journals consistently in the upper 10% in each of the four