Purpose & Goals

In preparation for the 2025 renewal of our Elsevier ScienceDirect agreement, our institution gathered significant data. After careful analysis of usage statistics and our researcher’s publishing output in Elsevier journals, we determined that it was time for a makeover of our library’s multi-year traditional subscription-based agreement.

Design & Methodology

We generated our COUNTER TR J4 ‘Journal Requests by Year of Publication’ reports for all our campuses for the total duration of our existing muti-year agreement. We requested a report from Elsevier showing various data fields for our researchers’ publications in Elsevier journals for the same period. We downloaded datasets from Web of Science and Scopus websites to determine the subject categories of the journals. We analyzed all this data using Tableau to identify patterns in our usage as well as in our researchers’ publications and to create a model for our next agreement.

Findings

Our analysis identified four areas of potential improvement in the coming license period, including: (1) cost per use was too high i.e. the way we calculate cost per download is significantly different than the standard method ; (2) lack of funding disadvantaged some disciplines in transitioning toward open access publishing; (3) total number of OA articles in hybrid journals were very low; and (4) OA articles were published mostly in journals with lower impact factors and lower citation counts.
Action & Impact    At the end of our negotiations, we reached an OA agreement that is going to improve all of these. The best thing about this is that we accomplished this with less than 0.5% increase on our current annual increase and a projected average cost savings per OA article in a hybrid journal of 89%. At the end of our contract term, we project more than 3,330 OA articles compared to 246 OA articles without an OA agreement.

Practical Implications & Value

Although our new agreement has been in effect for the last three months, we already see a positive impact on these areas, and our researchers seem to enjoy the makeover.