A Glimpse of Access Fees at University of Southern California Libraries

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>

Istarted 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 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 efficient we could be. Although I “On the surface, did not fully understand the value fees for future or purpose of the hosting fees, I did content seem know I wanted less invoices! I asked this vendor if we could pay off the hosting fees that were being billed to be the most justifiable reason annually. There were 64 collections for a fee and the being billed with annual hosting fees that were purchased between 2006 and 2015. The vendor was price should be easily associated able to convert these to one-time with the quantity and presented us with an invoice to of content added pay off these recurring fees. They prepared a spreadsheet that showed the current one-time fee for each annually and should only collection and subtracted how much last while new we had paid to date to come up with the payoff price. This invoice was for $38,000 and the individual pay content is being added.” 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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APA-June_ATG_HALF.indd 1 resources from Vendor-B in one plan so that we had access to the greatest number of resources for the best price and had the least invoices possible. During the course of these negotiations, I did want to address fees and attempt to make them all go away! As with any negotiation, there is compromise. Vendor-B detailed all of the “continuing access fees” that were currently being charged, and they totaled $139,000 for 79 prior perpetual purchases. Vendor-B then determined that 59 collections were “closed files,” and their associated fees of $52,000 would be removed from the proposal. My assumption is that these collections are now static and no new content is being added. When did they become closed? That is a level of detail I did not think to ask at the time but is something I will certainly start asking for ongoing fees with this vendor and others. This left 20 “open file” collections with “continuing service fees” that total $87,000. These fees range from $238 to $8,280 per collection per year with an average of $4,372. The fees were defined as: “Cost for annual collections with open files (files with content added and royalties being paid).” While I did not want these continuing service fees to continue, this was an extremely large plan that was being developed with various opportunities to negotiate, so I had to pick and choose what to push for. In the end, Vendor-B did agree that the continuing service fees will not increase over the course of the 5-year agreement. Other parts of the plan do have annual increases. The $87,000 of fees represents about 6% of the overall cost of the plan. In light of my newfound desire to analyze fees further, I will address these again when we negotiate a new plan. Overall, the terms of this agreement met my goals for the comprehensive plan, so I am comfortable with the final result.

Priority Code: AP2103A

3/31/2021 12:16:12 PM

Vendor-C: Capped hosting Fees

Vendor-C is an example of a vendor that sets a cap or maximum for hosting fees, so there is some level of a “controlled snowball.” USC had purchased many perpetual collections prior to 2017, so by the time I made my first such purchase I was told there would be no hosting fees since we had reached our cap (or maximum). I did not ask if the cap was based on the number of collections or overall cost, but I worked with this vendor previously at a public library and had also reached a cap for no on-going fees, so I did not question it since I was familiar with their practice of capped fees. However, I eventually wanted to address the fees that we were paying annually for collections purchased prior to the cap. This came up when I was also trying to control how many invoices we received from this vendor. We had a variety of database subscriptions and also electronic standing orders. Often invoices would be for just 1 item and the hosting fees were all over the map — some were on a calendar year cycle, some fiscal year and some were random! While I worked with Vendor-C to minimize our invoices, I asked what could be done with the annual hosting fees. At the very least, I needed them to all be on the same billing cycle, but I really wanted them to either go away or somehow be reduced or modified. I mentioned Vendor-A to Vendor-C as an example of how hosting fees could be billed as a one-time option. The sales representative for Vendor-C did try to get that concept approved, but it was not accepted. The compromise was that the hosting fees for these 36 collections would not have an increase for 3 years. The current fees total $28,000 and range from $96 to $7,989 with an average of $796. The majority of these 36 collections have fees under $800 per year.

One collection has a hosting fee of $7,989 a year. This collection was purchased in 2004 for $365,000 with an annual hosting fee of $5,000 that remained the same for the first 5 years. I do not have direct access to all of the past invoices to see the annual increase for this hosting fee, but based on some more recent fees I can determine there was most likely a 5% annual increase after the initial agreement. Based on this, I can estimate that we have paid ca. $111,000 over 18 years of fees, which is 30% of the original purchase price. If the current hosting price continues for another 10 years, we will have paid half of the original purchase price in fees. The freeze on these 36 fees will be in place until 2022, and at that time I will once again negotiate to have these fees either paid off, eliminated or somehow adjusted further. The positive outcome with Vendor-C is that new archive collections that we purchase do not have any hosting fees.

Vendor-D: Lowest fees

The final example of access fees is from Vendor-D and has the lowest fees overall. We currently pay for access fees, archive fees or maintenance fees for 19 collections for a total of $12,700. The fees range from $73 to $1,190 with an average annual cost of $668. This vendor uses three terms to describe these fees, and I was told that access fees, archive fees and maintenance fees are interchangeable terms and “relate to the small ongoing yearly fees associated with an archive database purchase that covers access to our servers and ongoing platform enhancements.” Again, I do not have immediate access to the original purchase prices for these resources, but based on the total amount we currently spend with Vendor-D, these fees are equal to 3% of our overall subscriptions. For this example, I also have current usage stats and the usage on these 19 collections is relatively high. The cost per use ranges from $0.52 to $44 with an average of $6.00. I have not discussed these fees with the vendor, and their annual cost has remained static for a few years. With the new knowledge I have recently acquired, I will at the very least inquire whether these fees can be reduced, paid off or eliminated through another negotiation avenue.

Vendor-E and Vendor-F: Platform Fees

I would also like to share two examples of another type of fee related to multidisciplinary and multiformat databases. The first example from Vendor-E has a line item in our current agreement for a “User License.” When I questioned what this was, it was explained that it is a platform fee — basically a fee that is charged on top of the subscription costs to have users utilize the platform. I did try to get this eliminated and the compromise was that there would be no increase for this fee with the 3-year agreement. The fee is $32,000, and based on the total amount we spend with Vendor-E for a variety of subscriptions, this user license/platform fee is 7.25%. I have not worked that closely with Vendor-E and there were other concessions made within this agreement, so I was satisfied overall. I may question this fee when the current agreement needs to be re-negotiated. In addition to this agreement, we do make other purchases from Vendor-E that do not include additional fees.

Another fee that we pay is called a Technology Fee, and that is from Vendor-F. This is also from a vendor that we have multiple agreements with for a wide variety of resources. This fee is $26,000 and just over 5% of the total $500,000 agreement. Again, this fee will have no increase in the current 3-year agreement and other concessions were made within this agreement that made this fee somewhat agreeable.

(Table 1: Summary of Fees)

Conclusions

I hope that this variety of examples of fees and what they represent sheds some light on what our vendors are charging. I know that the arrangements I have made have been temporary compromises, but I do now feel better prepared and empowered to discuss fees in the future during new negotiations. I will continue to analyze the fees we pay in comparison to the cost of the resource, question their purpose and longevity and be more attentive to these details. I am comfortable with suggesting alternatives to vendors and I can envision making suggestions to pay off existing annual fees or ask if a one-time fee can be charged with new purchases. However, I will also consider how much we already spend with the vendor. I will ask for details about why an additional fee is charged and ask if the fee is meant for future content or technology enhancements.

On the surface, fees for future content seem to be the most justifiable reason for a fee and the price should be easily associated with the quantity of content added annually and should only last while new content is being added. Fees for enhanced technology are more difficult to justify because there is not always a one-to-one correlation between the fees and the platform development.

Could there be even other options to suggest? For the vendor who already has a cap or maximum for hosting fees, should there then just be a flat fee for hosting? If a library has purchased x-collections then there could be an annual hosting fee of x-dollars. Perhaps a flat hosting fee would be more acceptable and therefore also predictable and can be easily made transparent to customers. The vendors should also have a commitment to how such a fee is used by sharing clear roadmaps and development plans for the hosted platform. I certainly now have a better understanding of the variety of fees that vendors are charging libraries, and I will continue to ask questions and be more mindful of how funds are being spent.