The "unbundling" of big deal journal packages as an information practice
The “unbundling” big deal journal packages research lab website
Welcome to the “unbundling” big deals journal packages research lab website. We investigate the decision-making process of librarians involved in the cancellation of large e-journal packages in Canadian research libraries.
Mongeon, P., Siler, K., Archambault, A., Sugimoto, C. R., & Larivière, V. (2021). Collection Development in the Era of Big Deals. College & Research Libraries, 82(2). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.82.2.219
Simard, M.-A., Asubiaro, T., & Mongeon, P. (2021). The burden of article processing charges on Canadian universities. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes Du congrès Annuel De l’ACSI. https://doi.org/10.29173/cais1224
Ivanov, A. O., Cassady, S. &Johnson, C. A.(2020). An Agenda for Studying Big Deal Cancellation Projects as Information Practice. In CAIS2020: Diverging Trajectories in Information Science, An Open Virtual Conference
Ivanov, A. O., Johnson, C. A., & Cassady, S. (2020). Unbundling practice: the unbundling of big deal journal packages as an information practice. Journal of Documentation, 76(5), 1051–1067. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-09-2019-0187
Johnson, C. A., & Cassady, S. (2018). How librarians make decisions: The interplay of subjective and quantitative factors in the cancellation of the “Big Deal”. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes Du congrès Annuel De l’ACSI. https://doi.org/10.29173/cais982
Johnson, C. A., & Cassady, S. (2018). How librarians make decisions: the interplay of subjective and quantitative factors in the cancellation of Big Deals. Collection and Curation, 39(1), 6–14. https://doi.org/10.1108/CC-05-2018-0013
Shu, F., Mongeon, P., Haustein, S., Siler, K., Alperin, J. P., & Larivière, V. (2018). Is It Such a Big Deal? On the Cost of Journal Use in the Digital Era. College & Research Libraries. College and Research Libraries, 79(6), 785–798. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.6.785
Kate Johnson, Asen Ivanov (University of Toronto) and Samuel Cassady (2018) How librarians decide: Practice theory and the interplay of intrinsic and extrinsic evidence. Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) Seminar Series, 2018-19.
Cassady, S., Lynch, D., Olson, L., & Visser, A. (2017). The Librarian’s Survival Guide to the “Big Deal”: Tools for Unbundling. Roll With the Times, or the Times Roll Over You. Charleston Conference. https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316444
Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). Big Publishers, Bigger Profits: How the Scholarly Community Lost the Control of its Journals. Media Tropes EJournal, V(2), 102–110.
Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLOS ONE, 10(6), e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
The purpose of our study is to investigate the decision-making process of librarians involved in the cancellation of large ejournal packages, often referred to as “Big Deals”. The political economy of academic publishing, and in particular the business model followed by large publishers, which allows them to charge increasingly unsustainable prices for large ejournal packages, has become a topic of vigorous academic discussion and concern of library collection managers. Because of the pricing structure of these packages, it is difficult to break apart the packages cost effectively by buying back well-used titles without cancelling lesser used ones as well as some highly used, or useful, ones. Librarians are often conflicted about how to make these decisions, either based solely on quantitative determinations of value or more subjective criteria.
Little attention has been paid to the strategies undertaken by academic librarians to respond to the pressures of the publishing market. This project will fill this gap by studying the practices and politics behind the collection management strategies librarians use to navigate the scholarly communication ecosystem.
To explore this topic, we are studying the process of breaking apart, or unbundling, ejournal packages. The overarching objective of our study is to provide insight into the difficulties librarians face in accomplishing this task in the context of institutional support and pressure by users to provide comprehensive access to journals. To accomplish this we will interview librarians directly involved in the cancellation process as well as senior library administrators who are responsible for setting library policies. To get a fuller picture of the impact of these decisions on users, we will also interview faculty members and PhD students from different research and teaching areas. In short, we will comparatively examine the experiences of Canadian academic libraries that have recently attempted to unbundle Big Deals within the context of library decision-making models, library users’ demands for access to journals, and the support of library policy makers during the cancellation process
Apart from academic libraries that are reacting to the high cost of journal access, there are indications that academics on some journal editorial boards are also protesting by resigning en masse to start rival journals. I identified and discussed six cases of such resignations of editorial board members in protest of the unfair pricing model …
Toluwase Asubiaro, September 12, 2020 Welcome to our “unbundling big deals” website. You may rightly be wondering; what are the “big deals”? Big deals are the bundle of subscription packages that are paid for by universities so that members of their academic communities can have access to the subscribed resources. The commonest big deals are …
Journal of Infometrics (JOI) editors resigned in 2019 to start Quantitative Science Studies because of the unethical and unfair practices of Elsevier, one of the “big five” academic journal publishers. At the point of creating JOI in 2005, Elsevier was attractive as the ideal publisher for the academic journal because of its reputations as one …