Access Fees: Controlling the Snowball By Lizzie Cope (Electronic Resources Access Librarian, University of Tennessee) <cope@utk.edu> and Elyssa M. Gould (Head, Acquisitions & Continuing Resources, University of Tennessee) <egould1@utk.edu>
Background The University of Tennessee, Knoxville is the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee System. UT Knoxville is an R1 doctoral granting public institution with about 30,000 students. There are three campus libraries: John C. Hodges Library, Devine Music Library, and Pendergrass Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine Library, known collectively as UT Libraries.
A History of Access Fees Access fees. Hosting fees. Annual maintenance fees. No matter the name, these additional fees have historically been used by vendors to help cover a small percentage of the costs of hosting and maintaining the resources libraries purchase. A small percentage annually may not seem like a lot, but a compounding fee can quickly turn into a snowballing financial burden. At UT Libraries, our access fees had not been reviewed in over a decade resulting in miscommunication and sky-rocketing prices. Over the past few years we’ve managed to wrangle our access fees thanks to data, a new philosophy, and transparency. So what exactly is an access fee? It’s a fee charged by vendors to cover the costs of hosting and maintaining a purchased online resource. These fees are typically an annual fee that is a percentage of original cost. However, it may not always be called an access fee. We reviewed all of our invoices from 2020 and came up with a list of about fifteen equivalent terms used across our vendors. It’s important to note that none of our invoices detailed what the access fee was specifically paying for. To better understand when these terms started to be used, we plugged each equivalent term into three library specific indexing & abstracting databases: Library and Information Science Source (EBSCO), Library Information Science and Technology (EBSCO), and Library & Information Science Abstracts (ProQuest). Looking at the results, we can see a huge spike in use over the past 20 years. Most of the mentions from the past
10 years are press releases for new library resources detailing cost. This implies that access fees are an expected additional cost and are standard across the industry. See Image 1: Access Fee Mentions in Library Literature Review. Many of you may have guessed what coincided with the jump shown on the graph above: electronic resources. As libraries began to transition content from physical to electronic, costs also transitioned. For physical resources, maintenance costs resided with the library. With electronic content, the vendor or publisher is maintaining the resource, so there is an expectation for payment for this maintenance and continued access. Much of this maintenance is automated. Obviously, those maintenance costs are not equivalent. Maintenance of physical and maintenance of electronic is like comparing apples to smartphones. This process was all new for libraries and publishers and it wasn’t yet clear how costs would be determined. However, the overall expectation was that libraries would save significantly. This quote from Roger Schonfeld et al in 2004 perfectly captures the moment for libraries. There is uncertainty and a sense of foreboding: Other observers have noted their belief that the format yields “savings” to which they might like to lay claim. Some publishers appear to be making the case that savings resulting from the transition should somehow be returned to them in the form of rising prices. [...] Certainly, libraries should carefully consider the implications of re-allocations deriving from the format transition. It might be fair to say that our library was not planning for our future stagnant budget (or a pandemic for that matter), based on the fees we are dealing with today. Decisions made over 10 years ago have had lasting impacts on our collections budget.
Developing a Philosophy At UT Libraries, we had a moment in 2019 where one staff member realized that we were spending $75,000 on access fees with just one vendor. That struck us as an incredibly high amount, especially since we knew we had access fees with more vendors. This is how we started down the path of developing our own access fee philosophy — by looking at what happened historically at our library, and questioning it.
Image 1: Access Fee Mentions in Library Literature Review
10 Against the Grain / June 2021
Some of our basic questions were: where are we spending our money now? What are our current collection priorities? And then we moved onto the harder questions. First we looked to the past and realized we hadn’t had a budget increase in 10 years. With annual inflation costs averaging 6-8%, we knew that already depressed our budget. Looking into the future, we know that we will have another flat budget next fiscal year. Plus there are always new resources that we want to gain access to for our students and faculty. Ac-
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