“Unbundling big deals” is a big deal

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 made with journal publishers so that professors and students can have access to their journals which are mostly closed access. Think of Elsevier, Springer, Emerald, Sage, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis publishing well more than 50% of all the journal articles in 2013 (Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon, 2015), bundling subscription to access to all the journals is any of these publishers’ database is a “big deal”.

Now that the I have explained the concept of “big deal”, it will be easy to as well explain the meaning of “unbundling the big deal”. Studies such as Shu et al., (2018) have shown that library patrons derive little value from the big deals, sometimes over 75% of journals in “big deal” packages are either uncited or totally unused by the university scholars. Because of this, methods have been devised to identify the journals that academic community in a university use. Some of these methods employ usage data form the internet, citation data from bibliographic databases and survey data from professors and graduate students. University libraries therefore opt to subscribe to the few journals that are used or useful in their patrons.

Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. https://doi-org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

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 | Shu | College & Research Libraries. College and Research Libraries, 79(6), 785–798. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.6.785