As Brock community members will be aware, the university underwent an intensive budget mitigation exercise in order to reduce the operating deficit for the fiscal year 2024-2025. As a result, the Library acquisitions budget was frozen at the 2023-2024 level ($5.75 million): We did not receive the inflationary protection increase as we have in previous years. For context, annual inflationary protection in the acquisitions budget (~2-3% increase) has historically aimed to sustain the library collection.
Structural Challenges: Annual Subscription Increases
In planning for the coming year, the Library must account for standard annual subscription price increases from publishers and vendors. These increases can range from zero to over twelve percent.
Subscriptions constitute the majority of our annual spending (see Figure 1). As a result, recurring pressure in the form of annual increases can have an outsized impact on the overall picture.
Figure 1: The 2024 Library acquisitions budget is $5,745,000. Subscriptions account for 75% of the total, books: 19%, and infrastructure: 6%
As terms come up for renewal, we are negotiating to keep increases as low as possible – but a frozen acquisitions budget means we need to find savings to absorb anticipated price increases.
Structural Challenges: The ‘Big Deal’
The prominent business model for most publicly funded research is the profit-driven, highly consolidated scholarly publishing industry. Publishers gain the rights to the work of academics and then sell the research back to university libraries with steep profit margins.
The major publishers bundle their catalogue of journal subscriptions into large, expensive packages, known as “Big Deals”. Brock University Library subscribes to all five major scientific journal Big Deals: Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Sage.
Over the last decade, academic libraries worldwide have been responding to the combination of budgetary pressures and a broken, exclusionary publishing system by closely assessing and sometimes cancelling some of their Big Deals. A non-comprehensive list of “Big Deal” journal cancellations can be found on SPARC’s website: Big Deal Cancellation Tracking – SPARC (sparcopen.org)
Summer 2024 Assessment Project
The Library is currently focused on an assessment project, reviewing our current usage and spending patterns to find savings. The assessment team includes librarians and staff from the Collections Services department, led by the Head of Collections Services.
Project Principles:
- Ensure any cuts are distributed: Not overly harming a single discipline.
- Evidence-based. Collect usage data to inform decisions.
- Assess high-cost materials. Evaluate Cost Per Use/value for money.
- Balance with qualitative data. Consider Brock’s unique programs and strategic directions.
- Consider what work the library can reasonably absorb: Cuts are not labour-neutral & typically remove efficiencies.
Communication
In April 2024, the Library presented information about the acquisitions budget and collections assessment to various stakeholders, including Research & Scholarship Policy Committee, Teaching & Learning Policy Committee, Research Strategy Operations Group, Library Representatives Meeting, and the Associate Deans Meeting. Library budget planning was also presented at the February meeting of the Planning Priorities and Budget Advisory Committee.
Further communication efforts will include keeping this webpage updated with project developments and additional information sessions in the fall.
You are welcome to contact us with questions or concerns.
Monica Rettig, Acting Associate University Librarian Research mrettig@brocku.ca
Alicia Zorzetto, Head Collections Services azorzetto@brocku.ca