The Charleston Advisor / October 2020
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ADVISOR INTRODUCTIONS
From Your Managing Editor Licensing for Libraries During the Pandemic doi:10.5260/chara.22.2.3
George Machovec (Managing Editor, The Charleston Advisor)
L
ibraries and the publishing community have a symbiotic relationship. For many years, the two were in somewhat of a steady state relationship where purchasing and licensing were being driven by local needs, available funding, changes in technology, and competition in the marketplace. The 2020 pandemic has caused a major upheaval for all library types with local needs and available funding radically changing. In academic libraries, the move to digital resources has been expedited as faculty and students have limited access to print material. Funding for both academic and public libraries has taken a dramatic turn as materials budgets are being slashed, causing havoc for not only renewals but also new subscriptions. Most libraries are not licensing new journal, book, or database packages due to limited funding and the need keep existing resources available. At the same time, substantial cancellations are taking place as libraries try to survive the downturn. This is affecting not only local libraries but also consortia as these cancellations are affecting group purchases with many libraries exercising financial exigency clauses to remove themselves from unaffordable subscriptions. Since most libraries are experiencing some level of budget cuts, the annual inflation rates historically expected for most products and services are currently not tenable. At minimum, most libraries would like to see zero percent inflation rates on renewals for the next few years, if not downright reductions in base costs. Publishers and vendors must realize that this request is not to be difficult but libraries may not have the funding and are often being forced to spend additional money on pandemic related expenses, often being pulled from the collections budget. Vendors and publishers are also feeling the financial squeeze as libraries cancel or reduce their spending for subscriptions and one-time expenses. New products or services, which often took years to develop, are seeing very little uptake in the library community unless they are crucial to an organization or perhaps related to managing the downturn. Pandemic related products are being introduced by many vendors and publishers. Those that are offered for free or low cost are welcome and appreciated (see review of the ProQuest Coronavirus Research Database in this issue as an example). Many publishers have provided custom portals to articles related to Covid-19 and the pandemic and made them Open Access. This move is not only welcomed by researchers and scholars but also the general public who might want to view research that has not been filtered through the lens of politics and interpretation by others. Google Scholar (<https:// scholar.google.com/>) has provided links on its home page to many of these free publisher portals as well as doing its usual indexing.
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Librarians are employing many different tools to help in determining what to cancel or purchase in the downturn. Unsub (<https://unsub.org/>), formerly called unpaywall, has been developed by non-profit Our Research (<https://ourresearch.org/>) to help librarians make better decisions on how to cancel or cut back on big deal journal packages (see review in this issue). The software has loaded subscription information from major publishers (e.g., Elsevier, Wiley, SpringerNature) and a library can upload usage data and perpetual access information to model costs for ILL if a subscription were reduced or eliminated. This can be done at the individual library level and the company has recently added a consortia dashboard for those that want to do group modeling. This software was originally developed for those working on negotiating transformative agreements to move publishers towards Open Access, but has found additional utility in the economic downturn if a library or consortium just needs to cut back or cancel. A very low cost service well worth the money. Gold Rush Decision Support (<https://www.coalliance.org/software/ gold-rush>) was developed by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries and has a journal comparison module. The service has over 1,700 title lists covering publishers, aggregators, and abstracting/indexing services to allow libraries to do title-level comparisons between packages. A unique feature is that it also includes abstracting and indexing services. It is possible to quickly model what would happen if a product were cancelled in comparison to other related products. Once again, Gold Rush is a very low cost solution being offered by a non-profit organization. ProQuest and some other vendors have also developed similar tools but these are often only accessible as part of larger packages to which a library must subscribe. The Charleston Advisor (<http://charlestonco.com/>) and its sister database, ccAdvisor (<http://ccadvisor.org/>), are also useful tools in determining what to acquire, cancel, or retain. In addition to providing detailed objective reviews by experts in the field, each review provides a related products section where readers can be directed to other similar services, some of which may be Open Access. Many economists have suggested that the return to “normal” will take many years or even fundamentally change how society operates. The economic impacts on libraries will continue to be a major issue with federal, state, and local funding being altered for years to come. As libraries economically struggle and alter their services to meet patron needs, the fundamental nature of what can be realistically licensed will adjust with lower expectations. n
