Four Small Minnesota Colleges Say No to the "Big Deal"

-- Library Journal, 5/25/2004

Four small private liberal arts colleges in Minnesota have decided not to renew their three-year Science Direct deals with STM publisher Elsevier. Under their previous deal, each college-- Carleton, Gustavus Adolphus, Macalester, and St. Olaf--had electronic access to around 700 Elsevier journals through a deal negotiated through MINITEX, a state cooperative of academic, public and special libraries. In a statement, the four colleges said they were motivated by a number of reasons, including an increasing annual financial commitment to Elsevier, even though the deal was partially subsidized by the state. "The inability to cancel titles was a major issue," said Terri Fishel, library director at Macalester College. That sentiment echoes the complaints offered by a number of major research libraries, including Harvard, Cornell, Duke and the University of North Carolina, which also declined to renew their Science Direct deals over the past year. Fishel said that, under the terms of the new deal, 60 titles would not be eligible to be cut, as opposed to 41 under the previous contract. "We did a projection on how much of our budget would be committed to Elsevier and, by the end of three years, they would have approximately 21 percent of our periodicals budget dollars, and that would be only if our budget was static," Fishel explained.

In addition to committing more budget dollars, Fishel said the new deal also offered less access that the previous contract. Previously, participating libraries were allowed to access any journal that any participant subscribed to in print. For the new deal, however, libraries would all share "a selected list of titles" and each institution would then be allowed access only to their own subscriptions. Fishel notes that under that arrangement "there was no mutual benefit" for pooling subscriptions for the good of the larger group. In the statement, the schools said, "Scientists now recognize that this is not a library problem, but a broader crisis in scholarly communication. Barbara Fister, librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, said that the problem goes beyond the Science Direct contract: "We tend to demonize Elsevier to some extent, but a lot of publishers, including some scholarly societies, are also part of the problem. In general, we need to make clear to publishers that libraries aren't an endless supply of revenue. We've hit the wall." Fishel says Macalester has increased its support of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and became members of open access publisher Public Library of Science. "We are monitoring the open access initiative closely," she says, noting that faculty outreach will also play a large role in bringing about much needed change.