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. 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 Image 1: Access Fee Mentions in Library Literature Review access to for our students and faculty. Ac-

cess fees seemed like an area that we may be able to exert some control over. Our main issues with these fees were: • The annual increases; • Low use of some of our purchased resources; • Feeling like we were double-paying for platform maintenance when we had both subscriptions and access fees from purchased content on the same platform; • For older purchases, the access fee cost sometimes outpaced the original purchase price.

With these concerns in mind, the philosophy we developed for access fees is two-fold. For new purchases, our philosophy is to not impact future years’ budgets via access fees. For existing access fees, our philosophy is to freeze, lower, or eliminate costs to alleviate pressure on our collection budget.

Pre Purchase

strategies

Considering our philosophy for new purchases, our process for trialing new resources needed a refresh. Previously, trials were considered a time to review content and garner feedback from our patrons. While that still holds true, we now predominantly see trials as a time to communicate our expectations with vendors. During a trial of a new resource, we send the vendor a forty question form to complete. The form covers topics like MARC records, COUNTER stats, accessibility standards, and pricing options. During this time, we express our preference for no additional fees. This helps set the stage for price negotiation if we decide to pursue a purchase.

Once all necessary information is gathered from the vendor, we compare one-time costs (plus fees) versus subscription costs. We use ten years as a standard marker for comparison. We are very transparent about this comparison with our vendors and discuss options. If the vendor is not interested in no fees, we ask for flat access fees to control future annual budgeting. Our vendors have responded positively to the form and our librarians appreciate having all of the necessary information to make an informed purchase decision.

Post Purchase

Our strategies for aligning our existing access fees with our current priorities fall into two camps: actions we take when we have time but limited money, and actions we can take when we have both time and money. For that vendor where we had $75,000 in access fees, we realized that we were still being charged fees for collections that had ceased growing. By examining whether a collection was growing or complete, we were able to realize a savings of $25,000.

This year, as we have been faced with another flat budget and the threat of potentially giving money back, we have turned to usage statistics and cost per use calculations. We’ve had several resources across multiple vendors where the use over the last three years does not warrant the cost of the access fee. We have presented this information to the vendor and requested a reduction in our fee. Sometimes they are able to grant a one-time reduction, which gives us another year to assess the resources; sometimes they are able to grant a permanent reduction; and sometimes we receive no reduction at all. But you don’t know until you try.

Under the “you have both time and money” category, last fiscal year we had additional funds at the end of the year and were able to “buy out” access fees for one vendor. The amount we paid was about 10 years’ worth of access fees, but in return we were promised that we would never be charged an access fee again for those resources.

We also had a situation last fiscal year where we were pursuing a one-time purchase of a database from a vendor, and wrapped the access fees for our previous purchases from that vendor into the negotiation. In return for purchasing the new database, we were guaranteed that our access fees for our old purchases would be frozen at the same rate for three years.

Looking Ahead

Our ideas for future improvements around the nebulous topic of “access fees” are largely about advocacy. We suggest that libraries: 1. Advocate for the inclusion of access fees in the original purchase price. We explain our flat budget situation to the vendor up-front and request that the purchase price include all future access fees. 2. Use open communication to determine our expectations for the purchase of a resource. This also follows the earlier point — state what works for us and our library up front. We also ask a lot of questions during the trial process, as discussed earlier, which helps the vendor set expectations for our negotiation. 3. Advocate for vendors to use a standardized vocabulary to describe access fees. This is something that hasn’t been tackled yet — but this would establish and normalize what is and could be charged in an access fee situation. There are many names under the “access fee” umbrella, and those various names make it difficult to compare what we are being charged for with what we are obtaining for that cost.

Conclusion

The big things that we learned (or were reminded of) while developing our access fees philosophy are that libraries don’t own the content. If we still want to keep the content we previously paid for, we will likely need to maintain a cost of some sort. Our current philosophy may help us change this going forward, but for our older purchased content, this is the reality.

We also learned that data is key in advocating for your library’s needs — having usage information handy as well as a basic understanding of the resource was important for negotiating effectively with vendors. Also, our experience over the last two years emphasized that it takes a lot of time to examine the data. Especially for tackling a large amount of data at once. We also learned that asking questions can lead to creative solutions. Basic questions such as “why is it this way” or “this is our goal, how can you help us get there” really opened up conversations.

Over the last two years, UT Libraries has learned the importance of examining our access fees. It’s taken clear communication, transparency with our vendors, and trial & error to coalesce around an access fee philosophy that works for our library. With time, data, and creativity, we have a solid foundation for relieving pressure from our collections budget and controlling the access fee snowball.

references

Schonfeld, R.C., King, D.W., Okerson, A., & Fenton, E.G. (2004). Library periodicals expenses: Comparison of non-subscription costs of print and electronic formats on a life-cycle basis. D-Lib Magazine, 10: 1. Retrieved from http://www.dlib. org/dlib/january04/schonfeld/01schonfeld.html.