At least in part, the goal has been to drive down costs (and perhaps to drive down profits of commercial publishers) in addition to increasing access for readers. Libraries have put great effort into developing institutional repositories, supporting campus open access mandates, and advocating for APC funding. Generally speaking, there is little reason to pay for something that is openly available and particularly not when doing so prevents paying for other things that library users need. In this essay I would like to raise the possibility that the increasing availability of open access content, coupled with the potential for systematized efforts to put that open content into the user workflow, could be a mechanism for librarians to gain some control of their budgets and pricing.
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In reality, for many librarians, the task at hand is what to cancel.Īs one potential remedy to budget challenges, Kristin Antelman has suggested an approach for calculating an Open Access-adjusted Cost per Download metric to leverage in negotiations.
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Thus, the challenge facing librarians is not how to spend increasing amounts of money on increasing amounts of content but rather how to spend decreasing amounts of money as effectively as possible.
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No library is able to buy or license all of the content that would be useful to its community of users most regularly find their buying power declining as their budgets do not keep pace with inflation much less price increases beyond that. In contrast, librarians have expressed frustration at their seeming inability to influence the numerator part of the cost-per-use equation. Indeed, publishers themselves put a great deal of effort into increasing use as well. Libraries have many strategies for increasing use and the interests of publishers are aligned with this approach as it does not threaten subscription revenues. As such, there are two possible strategies for improving the cost-per-use ratio as a measure of value, either driving up use or lowering the cost.
However, is it always that case low cost-per-use is an indicator of good value? If the true value is of a subscription is being obscured by over-utilization, should libraries seek to dampen such excess in order to have more appropriate measures of the real value of a subscription? By doing so, could a library then negotiate for better prices on some resources and thereby more effectively steward a limited budget allocation in order to better serve its community of users? The Banker’s Table, William Michael Harnett (1848–1892)Ĭost-per-use is a ratio of two components - the numerator (cost) and the denominator (use).
Librarians are as likely to make this argument as publishers, typically to show that our institution is receiving a good value for its investment in the library’s collections. We don’t have to look too hard to find someone arguing that a particular subscription database is a good value because it has a lower than average cost per use.
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