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We are pleased to announce that a significant ongoing investment by the Office of the Vice President (Research), leveraged from the Research Services Fund, will ensure that the Dr. John Archer Library and Archives will be able to maintain both the Wiley and Taylor& Francis journal packages for the foreseeable future. We would like to recognize the work of Dr. Christopher Yost, Dr. David Gregory, and Mr. Dave Button in achieving this significant endorsement of the Archer Library’s role in the teaching, learning, and research enterprise of the University of Regina.
For the past several years, the Archer Library’s acquisitions budget has been operating at a deficit. Our acquisitions budget today is below the level it was in 2009 ($2.97M compared to $3.13M), while annual vendor increases, inflation, and the fluctuating value of the Canadian dollar have decreased our relative buying power by over $1M in the same time period.
The Library is committed to strategically balancing its acquisitions budget while minimizing impact on teaching, research and curriculum development at the University of Regina.
The Library’s Collection Assessment Team (CAT) has identified subscriptions to Wiley and Taylor & Francis packages for non-renewal. Journals from all disciplines will be impacted by the non-renewal. Rather than subscribing to the entire packages, we will be individually subscribing to journals from these publishers: 21 from Wiley, and 13 from Taylor & Francis. More information about those titles is available in the linked documents below.
The decision is data-driven and is based on the principles of stewardship, transparency, fairness, and equity across all disciplines. We have set up this webpage to provide more information to the campus community about our decision-making process.
Multidisciplinary - Multidisciplinary packages were considered to ensure that no single department or discipline had to absorb all cancellations, and instead the cancellations were distributed across all disciplines to attempt to ensure maintenance of the broadest possible access for all students, staff and faculty.
Cost per use - Both of these journal packages have a large number of titles with a high cost per use, meaning that usage is low while the subscription cost is high. For example, cost per use for several Wiley journal titles is in excess of $300 per article, and one is as high as $1600 per use.
Un-bundling options - These publishers make it affordable to 'un-bundle' the packages, so we can subscribe to individual titles as needed.
Post-cancellation access - Due to prior licensing agreements in place with these publishers, we would retain access to the backfiles from these publishers, and the options for re-subscribing at a later date are much more favourable. This allows us to retain access to 65% of the content while still balancing the acquisitions budget.
Open Access Agreements - Some publishers now offer transformative agreements that include reduced pricing for Author Processing Charges on Open Access articles (Wiley, for example, does not). The Library remains committed to advancing open access and considered support for OA as part of the decision making process. Read more about transformative agreements.
Annual vendor increases/inflation, the fluctuating value of the Canadian dollar, and the University’s fiscal challenges/decisions have (over the years) decreased the relative buying power of the Library’s Acquisitions fund.
This reality necessitates a reduction in this year’s scholarly publishing purchasing/licensing. To ensure the long-range sustainability of our collections, the Dr. John Archer Library & Archives (Library) will reduce acquisitions spending by $200,000. This will achieve a balanced collections budget for the 2022-23 budget year.
The Library’s Collection Assessment Team (CAT) has identified subscriptions to Wiley and Taylor & Francis packages for non-renewal. Journals from all disciplines will be impacted by the non-renewal. However, some titles from each package will be individually renewed (21 from Wiley and 13 from Taylor & Francis).
The decision is data-driven and is based on the principles of stewardship, transparency, fairness, and equity across all disciplines.
The overall review of ongoing spending was conducted and, given the size and time frame for the reduction, the determination was made that only a few products would be able to meet the target ($200,000) and interdisciplinary criteria for the project. None of subject/discipline focused products were considered to meet the principles of fairness, and equity across all disciplines.
To meet the goal of unbundling “big deal” ejournal subscription packages, several products were reviewed using Unsub, a big-deal review tool for libraries that creates different cancellation scenarios. Considerations included journal prices, interlibrary loan costs, open access, post cancellations access, authors' publications and citations and other methods of forecasting. Two packages, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, were identified for non-renewal and retention of best value titles. Similar criteria were used to determine the list of individual subscriptions to be continued with usage/download statistics criteria having the most weight. A majority of heavily used titles also had the highest citation numbers.
Until December 31, 2022: Full text direct access to all currently subscribed journals from Wiley and Taylor & Francis.
After January 1, 2023:
Please note: The University community will not lose access to resources identified for non-renewal. Articles from any non-subscribed journal can be requested at no cost to all students and faculty through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).
Please refer to our help page on using Quick Find to find alternate access to articles and place ILL requests.