1. The “Big Deal” Knowledge Base
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) tracks and maintains open repositories of big deal information on three key issues; cancelled “big deals”, full text of “big deal” licenses, and “big deal” costs to help academic libraries understand the best practices all over the world and access freely information about trends in journal subscription deals and journal packages cancellation.
The “big deal” cancellation tracking database contains up-to-date information about universities or library consortium that cancel journal subscription packages. The database specifies details of the negotiations, outcome of the negotiations and savings accrued in dollars.
Another important up-to-date “big deal” information that is published on the SPARC website is the full text of “big deal” licenses. This is available free of charge so that libraries that are negotiating or will negotiate with publishers can have ample access to this resource which can help them to make informed decision.
Lastly, the website also contains data on the fee Universities around the world are paying for journal subscription packages. Making this data available to the public can also help academic libraries stay current about the competitive cost of journal and database subscription cost.
2. Journal and Database Subscription Cost Data for CRKN member Libraries
The 28 member libraries of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) released their 2016-2017, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 data for journal and database subscriptions licensed through the Canadian Research Knowledge Network consortium. The journal and database subscription cost datasets were made available through the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR).