When a major subscription contract with Dutch publishing giant Elsevier was cancelled by the State University of New York (SUNY) program in favor of a smaller, cheaper subscription bundle, news centered on how much money the university can save: around $7 m.
But there was a careful cost-benefit analysis behind the savings and a software tool, Unsub, that helped SUNY work out how to make the most of its subscription dollars. As cash-strapped universities try to weather the COVID-19 pandemic, many expect the approach to catch on more broadly.
SUNY faced a $9 million annual bill for its subscription to approximately 2200 Elsevier titles. But Unsub revealed that by spending $2 million a year for just 248 of the journals, the university could give immediate access to approximately 70 percent of the Elsevier papers they are likely to read in the next 5 years to researchers at its 64 campuses. The tool generates its forecasts by analyzing data from the library journal usage of each university and by searching the web to see how many papers accessible by faculty and students are available free of charge.
Unsub is a “game changer,” says Mark McBride, senior strategist at SUNY ‘s library in Albany, and “I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that.” SUNY was looking for savings, as many universities were chafing at high subscription fees and fearing the budgetary impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. And with the help of Unsub, says McBride, it concluded that “a big deal is no longer necessary for a library to function effectively.” Unsub, previously known as Unpaywall Journals, was launched in November 2019 by Jason Priem and Heather Piwowar, co-founders of Impactstory, a scholarly service firm.
Launched in 2017, it searches the web for copies of paidwalled papers that are freely accessible on online archives, preprint servers and academic databases, helping scholars legally circumvent paywalls. A 2017 study by Priem and Piwowar found that about half of the papers searched for by Unpaywall users were free to read on the web anywhere. But many librarians said that they were still not clear about whether that finding meant they could scale back their subscriptions, says Priem.
Priem and Piwowar built Unsub to solve that problem, for which they charge $1000 per library per year. Priem says 300 libraries have already signed up for the tool, and he expects that it will lead to more cancellations in the summer on big deals. “It’s about getting powers back into the libraries,” he says. (A similar purpose tool called 1figr, produced by 1Science, a scholarly service firm, was discontinued after Elsevier acquired 1Science in 2018, and its parent company, Science-Metrix.) For SUNY, Unsub showed that a modest number of subscriptions would be sufficient to supplement the large number of Elsevier papers already available outside paywalls.
Under the new arrangement, about 30 per cent of the papers that SUNY researchers can access are already free to read through open access and 25 per cent are available from SUNY’s backlog because the university has been subscribing to these journals for several years. McBride says SUNY has done its own estimates on which journals it had to keep paying for, and the findings are in line with the numbers of Unsub.
As for papers that are not accessible under the new agreement, he says that individual campuses can subscribe to additional journals that they find necessary, or buy temporary access to papers from other libraries through interlibrary loans.
Another option, he says, will be through document delivery services paying for individual papers. Despite these extra costs, he says the overall savings will be considerable.
SUNY is now rethinking its dealings with other subscription-based academic publishers with the help of Unsub. Nathan Mealey, associate university librarian at Wesleyan University for exploration & access, who also uses Unsub, says it’s likely that the pandemic will cause other universities to do the same.
“There is a drastically increasing disconnect between the fees charged by the vendors for their content and the price libraries are able and willing to pay for it. It seems likely COVID-19 will bring that tension to a head.
An Elsevier spokesperson tells Science: “Whatever options customers prefer, our aim is always to provide the best possible value for open and frictionless access to the highest quality content.”
