This is part of a series of profiles detailing the experiences of institutions that have unbundled or canceled big deal journal contracts. The aim of the series is to provide insights, lessons learned, and inspiration to libraries to consider a similar move.
Summary
In 2020, the University of Vermont Libraries faced a budget shortfall due to years of escalating journal prices and realized it could no longer afford its ScienceDirect contract with Elsevier. Library staff explained the situation to each unit on campus and the UVM Faculty Senate passed a resolution calling for the library to end its so-called ‘big deal’ with the publisher. Since exiting its big deal, the library has since saved hundreds of thousands of dollars or approximately 80% of its original package cost after accounting for individual subscriptions and on-demand purchases. Money has been reinvested in library staff and the university press’ open access publishing efforts. The cancellation prompted a larger conversation on campus about the value of open research, which led some UVM colleges to reform hiring and promotion policies to incentivize open practices and others are considering similar changes.
Preparation
To get faculty on board with unbundling from Elsevier, Bryn Geffert, dean of libraries, said he knew it would take work. He requested time on the agenda of every college faculty meeting and, over the course of a year, presented to nearly all units. “We used those meetings to provide an overview of the shared challenges facing scholarly communication – the increasing control by big multinational corporations and what that control has done to prices when they exercise monopoly power,” said Geffert. He used powerful graphics showing the increase of journal prices against university budgets and the consumer price index.
Rough Estimate of CPI/Journal Price Divergence. Source: Bryn Geffert utilizing data from ARL, the US Department of Commerce, and median, projected, yearly estimates from EBSCO.
The land grant mission of the University of Vermont was also central to Geffert’s pitch. “We are an institution chartered to serve not merely faculty and students but also the citizenry of the state and nation,” he said. “The current method of publishing, which locks so much of publicly funded research behind paywalls, is inconsistent with that mission.”
Faculty familiarity with the issue was varied. Some were very involved with the open access movement and were committed partners; others were learning about the situation for the first time. Geffert went into faculty meetings expecting skepticism and pushback about the potential inconvenience of the move – but that rarely materialized. “We started by worrying how we were going to talk to the faculty, but the reception was just extraordinary,” he said. “At the end of many meetings, faculty were actually encouraging us to walk away from the big deal.”
Decision, Outcomes, and Campus Response
After Geffert’s presentations, the sentiment was so strong that a resolution was brought to the UVM faculty senate and passed calling for the library to walk away from its ScienceDirect contract. Geffert said he workshopped the decision with the Faculty Library Advisory Committee to make sure its members were on board. With this support and the vote by the Faculty Senate, the library moved forward with breaking up its big deal and announced the decision at a subsequent meeting of the UVM Faculty Senate.
The library redirected some of the cost savings into supporting other means of providing access to research through Interlibrary Loans and additional staff hired to help with ILL. The library has also used Article Galaxy Scholar for on-demand purchasing, spending $108,000 on individual article purchases in 2024. The new system is working and requests for individual articles are much less than the price tag of the big deal – resulting in substantial cost savings for the university, Geffert said.The success of the move is prompting the library to consider reviewing its contracts with other publishers such as Wiley and Springer Nature as they near renewal.
Spurred by the initial campus conversation started by the library, UVM faculty expanded the discussion into changing hiring and promotion incentives to better align with open practices. A subcommittee of the Faculty Senate formed and put forward a resolution calling on all departments and colleges at the University of Vermont to revise their tenure and promotion guidelines to incentivize open scholarship. The resolution passed in 2023. Working with Meredith Niles, a UVM faculty member and open access advocate, and Tom Borchert, president of the Faculty Senate, another round of presentations on campus have been taking place. To date, four colleges within UVM have made changes to their review, promotion, and tenure guidelines, with The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences adopting the most comprehensive language incentivizing a suite of open sharing options in its review, promotion, and tenure documents while other units are considering following suit.
UVM Provost and Interim President Patty Prelock has been supportive of the open practice policies on campus and has shared the university’s example with HELIOS Open – a group of higher education administrators advocating for open research practices on campuses.
A profile of UVM’s efforts were published as a case study on the HELIOS Open website.
Progress is being made, Geffert said, and he is proud of UVM, yet it takes a change in faculty culture. “A lot of faculty have come on board, philosophically,” he said. “But it can still be difficult to convince faculty to take the extra five-ten minutes to upload a copy of their article to a repository. Idealism sometimes runs face-first into the effort needed to abide by philosophical commitments.”
Next Steps and Advice
The crisis in scholarly publishing can’t simply be solved by cutting spending with publishers whose pricing is unsustainable, Geffert said. “We have to offer alternatives if libraries are really serious about making scientific and scholarly literature universally available,” he said. “I see libraries evolving into the role of publishers. We have to start publishing under models that accord with our values.”
With money from the Elsevier cancellation, UVM has funded a new University of Vermont Press that’s run by the library. It supports the publication of Open Access journals and books using a Diamond Open Access model. “I’m convinced that this is where libraries have to head. We must provide good publishing venues committed to rigorous editing and peer review if we encourage people to walk away from old publishing venues,” Geffert said.
Geffert’s advice: “I can’t overemphasize the value of engaging with faculty,” he said. “Even if it means clearing your calendar for two weeks and doing nothing but going out and visiting, the time and effort will pay dividends that are invaluable.”
Geffert added that it’s important in the messaging to be optimistic. “There’s a very powerful doom-and-gloom message that ‘We cannot afford this.’ That’s true. We simply cannot afford this,” he said. “But there has to be a positive alternative articulated to help people understand that this is a noble and altruistic mission that they can join and there’s exciting work to be done in making our scholarship—created in the public interest—available to that public.”