Theme 3: Electronic Information Resources
Publishers' Packages: The Heart of Our E-Journal Collections
Brooklyn College subscribes through consortial arrangements to a number of e-journal packages offered by the journals' publishers.
- Science Direct - Our three year contract (2001-2003) for this critical product ended. This meant that 2004 was a stressful time for CUNY, as there was great doubt about whether SUNY would renew its contract on which we piggyback. While waiting for SUNY's decision, CUNY libraries put together a greatly reduced list of titles to which we would subscribe if SUNY pulled out and we had to go alone. Adding to CUNY's stress was City College's indication that it would not participate without SUNY. At last, SUNY renewed, but for one year only; this gave CUNY libraries approximately 1,021 journals in 2004, only 25 of which were unique to CUNY–this certainly demonstrates SUNY's superior collections strength. The increase in titles is partially owing to the fact that Elsevier has added other publishers to its stable: Academic Press, Cell Press, Mosby, Saunders, etc. For Science Direct in 2005, the jury is still out: SUNY says it will offer Elsevier a fixed sum of money and reduce its list of titles, and joining the SUNY contract is the best deal for which we can hope.
- Wiley- This package gives CUNY 142 Wiley journals. The community colleges (flush, owing to the Community College Investment Program) are presently being courted by Wiley and may reduce our costs by joining the fourteen schools already participating in this mini-consortium. Wiley also has an upstate NY consortium and the New York State Higher Education Initiative (NYSHEI) is working toward a single statewide contract. Were that to happen, CUNY would benefit greatly, both cost-wise and in terms of the number of available journals.
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Kluwer - This package offers us 232 journals, including some titles in the humanities and social sciences. Kluwer is another publisher with which NYSHEI is attempting to negotiate a statewide contract; as more schools join, the number of available titles will rise and the cost decrease.
- SciFinder Scholar - This product is an interesting example of intercampus cooperation. Two years ago Brooklyn, City, and Queens Colleges traded in their paper subscriptions to Chemical Abstracts for the much superior SciFinder Scholar. The cost per campus was approximately the same as that for the printed indexes, $26,000. In the fall 2003 City College expressed uncertainty that it could afford to resubscribe to this product, and Queens and Brooklyn could not afford to go it alone. ($78,500 divided by three is one thing; divided by two, it is quite another.) After much sturm und drang (with the University's coyly hinting that it might put some money on the table) the Graduate Center and Lehman College agreed to join our mini-consortium, City stayed the course, the product was renewed, and our $26,000 contribution to this electronic version of Chemical Abstracts dropped to $15,700. However, CUNY was within a hair's breadth of becoming an institution that grants doctorates in chemistry yet does not subscribe to either the paper or the electronic versions of Chemical Abstracts.
How best to subscribe to these packages (directly or through our subscription agent, EBSCO) is another tricky issue. Increasingly the publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Kluwer, etc.) offer a discount to institutions that pay them directly. When we pay directly, we save twice: not only do we get the publisher's discount, but we also avoid the subscription agent's service charge. However, EBSCO resents libraries' removing these higher-priced packages from their lists; they have begun to hint that libraries like Brooklyn endanger their ability to keep service charges low. (Presently Brooklyn pays directly for Wiley, Kluwer, and Elsevier.)
Wiley, Kluwer, and Elsevier are Brooklyn's three largest e-journal packages, but we also work with the Institute of Physics, American Institute of Physics, Optical Society, Acoustical Society, American Chemical Society, and other publishers.
