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
The Université de Montréal in Quebec has experience with unbundling its big deal contracts now stretching back a decade as an early adopter of this approach. UdeM unbundled from many big deal packages (including Wiley, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis) in 2014 and 2015, and aside from some lessons learned after the first unbundling, the campus community supported the library’s decisions. The library was able to subsequently renegotiate much better deals, which have saved more than $1 million annually. UdeM’s thorough data analysis documenting journal usage patterns enabled the university to resubscribe with publishers at a much better rate.
Preparation
Budget cuts by the Province of Quebec in 2014 meant the Université de Montréal faced a 17% cut in its library acquisitions budget. At the same time, journal prices continued to rise, and the institution’s purchasing power took a hit from a weakening Canadian dollar.
“It was really a crisis. We had to do something. We had to take bold decisions,” said Stéphanie Gagnon, directrice generale des Bibliothèques de l’Université de Montréal.
The library staff looked closely at the big deal for Wiley, as their next package up for renewal. Inspired by California Digital Library’s 2012 methodology on “Calculating scholarly journal value through objective metrics,” they did an analysis of Wiley’s journal collection considering quantitative factors, such as download stats, citations by UdeM community, and a combination of weighted indicators measuring the prestige of a publication, including SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) and SJR (SCImago Journal Rank). This was done without separating by discipline.
Using this analysis, the library decided on its own, internally, which package to cancel first, unbundling from Wiley in 2014. Many in the campus community were not pleased. “They essentially told us, ‘You should have asked us. We should have done it together,’” recalls Gagnon.
The library immediately formed a committee to build a new methodology for determining which titles to keep. This committee included Vincent Lariviere, professor at the UdeM School of Library and Information Science who specializes in infometrics and bibliometrics, as well as those who had been most vocally against the first round of journal cancellations. This group of librarians, faculty, and graduate students developed a survey that asked respondents about essential titles for their research, teaching, and learning. The information gathered was taken into account for the methodology that included three areas: usage stats, citations (based on average downloads over five years), and number of times a title had been mentioned in the survey. Rather than evaluate groups of periodicals in isolation, the improved methodology considered all periodicals of UdeM’s collection, segmented by discipline so as to take into account distinct practices in each field.
With the results, the committee evaluated the importance of each big deal for the university community. Of the 50,000 titles, the survey revealed that more than 16,000 had been used, 9,000 had been cited, and 8,000 had been mentioned by individuals as important. Then, the list was shared with 74 units on campus and reviewed by those units and the librarians, which resulted in more journals being added.
For the lowest-value big deals, only 10% of the titles were deemed essential to the community. For the best-value deals, 36% were deemed essential.
Decision, Outcomes, and Campus Response
Information from the survey was then used to unbundle from Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and the Institute of Physics in 2015. A second survey in 2022 provided the library with more usage data that has been helpful as the university prepared to rejoin some big deals at better rates. “We broke the chain. Now the negotiation is based on this fairer price value,” Gagnon said.
By renegotiating its big deals, UdeM has reduced its expenses on subscriptions by about $1 million annually—a significant savings in its annual $12 million collections budget. It has since re-entered contracts with each publisher, and Gagnon said it has been able to negotiate more reasonable prices.
When unbundling, faculty and the broader campus community were broadly supportive of the effort. Communication was central to the library’s ultimate success, Gagnon said. The need to pare back on subscriptions was discussed at in-person meetings with high-level administrators, student associations, faculty unions, researcher committees, and academic departments. Gagnon wrote articles for the community, created a website, and did several presentations at professional library associations, such as ALA and CARL, about the process.
“We made a lot of noise,” about publisher profits and the approach to unbundling, she said. Gagnon explained to the campus community why the change was needed, measures the library would put into place to ensure continuity of access, and how the transition would be implemented.
At first, faculty members worried about losing access to materials, but Gagnon said the library staff were able to address these concerns with a variety of strategies for providing continued access. In addition to leveraging openly available articles and backfiles, UdeM relied on InterLibrary Loan to fulfill requests for articles in journals that it dropped.
Next Steps and Advice
Many libraries have turned to Montréal’s example when considering how to approach unbundling. Gagnon said 28 Canadian libraries have used the methodology UdeM’s committee developed in 2015 when evaluating usage to make journal purchasing decisions (see CRKN’s Journal Usage Project).
With the money saved, the university is reinvesting in open infrastructure projects. “Now our energy is more dedicated to building green or diamond OA,” Gagnon said, adding her dismay about the Read and Publish and APC-based approaches. “I really don’t think transformative agreements transform anything.” She is hopeful about the potential of provincial funding in Quebec to create a network to support journals shift toward diamond open access.
Gagnon said the university has passed an open access policy that provides a foundation for decisions moving forward.
In the end, Gagnon said the university community felt good about the transition it made with its journal subscriptions.
“I think the faculty were just proud. They were standing up to the arrogance of the publishers,” said Gagnon. “Every year after the unbundling, we put on our website the profits of those big publishers. We used that to help our community always understand why we were doing this. At the beginning, it was a crisis. But, in time, it was the principle that we had to be respected for the value the big deals had for us.”
In addition to the internal efforts of the Université de Montréal Library, UdeM’s approach greatly benefited from the participation of Vincent Larivière, who holds the UNESCO Chair on Open Science, is a full professor at the School of Library and Information Science at the Université de Montréal, and is also the scientific director of the Érudit journal platform and deputy scientific director of the Observatory of Science and Technology.
Note: Those interested in investing funds saved from big deal contracts in open initiatives or in pursuing alternative access strategies to unbundle are invited to join the Strategic Priorities Working Group of SPARC’s Negotiation Community of Practice.