A Glimpse of Access Fees at University of Southern California (USC) Libraries By Alyssa G. Resnick (Head, Technical Services & Collection Development and Co-Associate Dean for Collections, University of Southern California) <alyssa.resnick@usc.edu>
I
started at the University of Southern California’s USC Libraries in April 2017 as the Head, Acquisitions & E-Resources and I am now the Head, Technical Services & Collection Development and Co-Associate Dean for Collections. For the bulk of my first two years, I spent time getting a basic understanding of our current subscriptions, learning terminology and access details related to academic resources and learning how to manage the budget. More recently, I have had to re-negotiate multi-year agreements that were first put in place before I arrived, and I have been paying greater attention to details related to long standing agreements or subscriptions. USC Libraries online resources are plentiful, and while I have added numerous new electronic resources, there is a large purchasing history from before 2017 and many of those come with ongoing annual fees. I have not done a comprehensive evaluation of the various fees that we currently pay, however they are often in the back of my mind for a variety of reasons. I view fees as problematic because they can be from vendors that we already spend with significantly, they can often appear to have no purpose and they can often be billed on individual invoices. I have been trying to reduce the overall number of invoices we process due to limited staff. I have generally been questioning fees when a new offer is presented to me or a multi-year agreement is up for renewal. There are many fees that I have not addressed yet, but we continue to pay. I recently attended the presentation at ER&L 2021, Access Fees: Strategies and Ideas for Controlling the Snowball, presented by Elyssa Gould and Lizzie Cope both from University of Tennessee, Knoxville and did not realize access fees were such a hot topic! This session and agreeing to write this article have now impressed upon me that I do need to analyze fees further. I am going to share a handful of examples of our fees that are mainly associated with perpetual purchases (or archive purchases), and I am not going to include the specific vendor that is affiliated with each one. I will share some calculated costs and percentages when I am able. However, in most cases I do not have a complete history of original purchase prices for perpetual licenses due to a variety of reasons and limited access to physical files during this time of work from home.
Vendor-A: One Time Hosting Fees One of the first examples of fees that I was introduced to comes from Vendor-A, and they use the term “hosting fees.” USC Libraries purchases all new primary source collections that Vendor-A produces each year with a significant discount. This was a longstanding arrangement that was made long before my arrival, and I continue with these purchases. The first new offer made to me also included a separate price for “one time hosting fees.” There was a separate hosting fee for each collection purchased. I do not remember questioning this, but I was told that in the past we had chosen the one-time option and not an annual hosting fee. Shortly after this purchase, I did discover that we had some annual ongoing invoices from Vendor-A for hosting fees. I was thoroughly confused since I thought we paid for the new collections and one-time hosting fees each year, so
12 Against the Grain / June 2021
I did not understand why we also had some on-going annual invoices. I then learned that prior to 2016, we had been paying the hosting fees on an annual basis because the vendor did not initially offer the one-time option. My electronic resources unit is relatively small compared to the size of our acquisitions budget so I was quickly realizing that the fewer invoices we receive, the more “On the surface, efficient we could be. Although I fees for future did not fully understand the value or purpose of the hosting fees, I did content seem know I wanted less invoices! I asked to be the most this vendor if we could pay off the justifiable reason hosting fees that were being billed annually. There were 64 collections for a fee and the being billed with annual hosting price should be fees that were purchased between easily associated 2006 and 2015. The vendor was with the quantity able to convert these to one-time and presented us with an invoice to of content added pay off these recurring fees. They annually and prepared a spreadsheet that showed should only the current one-time fee for each collection and subtracted how much last while new we had paid to date to come up with content is being the payoff price. This invoice was added.” for $38,000 and the individual pay off values ranged from $69 to $2658. The collections were purchased at different times over a 10-year period. I welcomed this option so that going forward we now only receive 2 invoices each year: 1 for the annual collections purchase and 1 for the one-time hosting fees. In this scenario, I have seen the value of the hosting fees. Over time, collections initially on an older platform have migrated to a newer platform, and new technologies have been integrated into the platform and are available across all collections. Prior to attending the ER&L session and agreeing to write this article, I did not pay attention to what the fees represented compared to the cost of the purchased collections. I looked at the cost of the purchases for the last 3 years (2018-2020) compared to the fees. The fees are 7.5% of the collection price. Is 7.5% a fair price? I am not sure I have the knowledge yet to answer that, but I do know I pay up to a 5% service charge on consortia subscriptions, so perhaps this is fair to cover the cost of hosting the collections and providing technology upgrades and enhancements on the platform. In this instance, not having on-going fees for these collections is a definite positive for my institution.
Vendor-B: Continuing Access Fees Prior to my arrival at USC, there was a 5-year comprehensive plan with Vendor-B that incorporated annual subscriptions and perpetual purchases. There were also several subscriptions and access fees that were not part of this comprehensive plan. I knew the plan was going to expire in 2019, so I did not address any issues related to fees until it was time to negotiate a new comprehensive plan. The goal of the new plan was to have all
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