Strategic Reinvestments of Journal Packages at the Pennsylvania State University

Abstract

In the face of budget challenges, organizational strategy changes, and the new open access (OA) policy, the Pennsylvania State University Libraries (PSUL) are reevaluating negotiations and collections of ‘big deal’ journal packages. While a growing number of libraries are considering cancelling subscriptions to ‘big deals’, PSUL has been taking a careful approach in containing cost and making sure that faculty and students have access to resources that they need. Current efforts include: renegotiating ‘big deals’; cancelling low value titles in title-by-title agreements; obtaining single agreements for the entire Penn State; promoting green OA for future subscription negotiation purposes; and renegotiating OA related licensing terms. To achieve greater efficiency of acquisitions workflows and increase university-wide purchasing power, reallocation of the collection budget will be discussed in the near future. Auto deposit of accepted manuscripts from any Penn State author into ScholarSphere, Penn State’s institutional repository, as well as exploration of other OA models are also under consideration.