The unsustainable constantly rising cost of “big deals” is one of the big concerns that university libraries face in recent years. Academic libraries therefore have devised strategies and employed different tools, including analytical tools such as the Journal Usage Project (JUP) and Journal Value Analytics (JVA), to understand the value that the academic communities they serve derive from the costly subscription to journal packages.
The “unbundling” analytical tools help academic libraries to take data-driven decisions to cut cost so that they can confidently subscribe to less expensive smaller packages of journals over the costly “big deals”. Unsub, launched in 2019, is one of the new analytics software that is being used by universities for “unbundling” big deals. It is a fast rising scholarly data analytics tool, as it has more than 200 already.
One of the proofs of the workings of analytic tools like Unsub is the whooping sum that was saved in subscription cost to Elsevier journals by the State University of New York (SUNY) library system. According to the Sciencemag, SUNY Libraries Consortium (SLC) reduced the cost of its Elsevier “big deal” from 9 million dollars annually by “unbundling” and subscribing to smaller package of 2 million dollars. With data-driven analysis from Unsub, SLC was able to save about 7 million dollars in 2020 and at the same time provide access to academic resources that are needed by its academic community.