EBSCO Projects Serials Price Increases of 4 to 6 Percent, Even as Academic Budgets Tighten
By Norman Oder Sep 16, 2010EBSCO this week released its serials price projections for 2011, estimating that "the overall effective publisher price increases for academic and academic/medical libraries for 2011 (before currency impact) to be in the range of 4 to 6 percent."
While that figure—as with the 5 percent increases for U.S. dollar customers in 2010—represents moderation compared to the range of 8 to 10 percent for the preceding few years, it's still out of sync with library budgets. EBSCO noted that as "the budget gap for libraries (the difference between publisher price increases and library budget increases) actually worsened in 2010 due to the overall decrease in library budgets."
Crisis coming?
Is this a crisis, given that times are so tough that some library organizations, like the NorthEast Research Libraries (NERL) consortium, have for more than a year asked for price reductions?
"Not yet," commented Stephen Bosch, Materials Budget, Procurement, and Licensing Librarian, University of Arizona Library, and co-author of LJ's 2010 Periodicals Price Survey, (published in the April 15 issue of LJ). "We think that this will be a year where both libraries and publishers are holding their collective breaths and that the coming year will be similar to the last."
What next?
"We believe that the collection tightening will continue, with libraries seeking to restrict Big Deal contracts to just the content that is really used to reduce costs," added Kittie Henderson, Director, Academic and Law Divisions, EBSCO Information Services, Bosch's co-author. "Collection evaluation will continue to evolve as libraries seek more 'bang' for their precious bucks."
"With the 2011 subscription scenario being finalized now, there have been fewer drastic collection reduction announcements, such as was recently made by New Mexico State University, than last year," she added. "However for most libraries the 2011 budget situation is comparable to, if not worse than, 2010."
The impact in New Mexico
In February, LJ reported on how New Mexico State faced a 27 percent cut in its materials budget. In a statement issued today, the library explained that the cancellations involve 723 print and electronic journals, databases, standing orders and microforms.
Moreover, library users will lose access to over 1,300 journals from the Springer and Elsevier/Academic Press publishing groups, given that multi-year and consortial packages with these publishers were discontinued.
One caveat re projections
In the report, EBSCO noted that, as with 2010, "the combined factors of the global recession, customized pricing by publishers for large e-package deals, and a general lack of transparency arising from new pricing models for e-content" complicate the process of making projections.
