Serials Allocation Changes in 2003-2004 Collections Budget

The Library collections budget for 2003/04 differs from past budgets in the distribution of serials dollars. Due to changes in the way journals are purchased by the Library, there has been a shift of $1.6 million from departmental serials lines in the budget to general library lines.

Over the past few years the SFU Library has been working on a project to migrate several hundred journals in our collection from print-only or print-plus-electronic to electronic-only formats. The Library migrated 200+ titles to electronic-only status in 2002; 300+ titles in 2003; and 400+ titles for 2004. In part, this shift has been in response to fundamental changes in the marketplace for scholarly journals. Many large publishers no longer market and sell journals on a title-by-title basis. Instead, they have moved to a bundled pricing model that offers expanded access for less money, in exchange for libraries moving to electronic-only status with their journals. During 2003, the SFU Library passed the important milestone of having more journals in electronic form (7000+) than print (5000+) in our collection. We expect the trend to continue.

The benefits of this model include vastly expanded access to the scholarly journal literature. In 2003 alone, SFU added over 1,000 new journal titles to our collection. The expanded access to online journals has been received very enthusiastically by the community, and usage levels have been high. Analysis of the usage statistics from several of these packages shows that the previously unsubscribed titles are being used as heavily as the titles previously held in our collection. After years of precipitous increases in our interlibrary loan statistics, these have finally been stabilizing, as hundreds of articles each month that would formerly have been requested from other libraries are now read online or printed at the reader's desktop at the time of need.

During this transition period, the Library's commitments have remained constant:
· We remain committed to developing a collection that reflects the research and teaching needs of our community;
· We continue to participate actively in provincial, regional and national library consortia to maximize our buying power and share resources with other institutions;
· We are committed to supporting small, society, non-profit, and open access publishers that offer a high-quality alternative to large commercial publishers of scholarly information;
· We continue to subscribe to print journals where appropriate, including new titles;
· We remain committed to an equitable allocation of library material funds between faculties, departments and disciplines, according to the size and information needs of each.

As the large publisher packages of e-journals are multi-disciplinary and can rarely be committed to a single departmental serials line in the budget, funds have been moved away from departmental lines and into central library lines in the budget. Departments have a diminished list of subject-specific journal titles in their designated lines in the Library collections budget. This shift provides an opportunity to move away from the Library's longstanding policy that a department must cancel an equivalent dollar value of subscriptions in order to start up new journals. Although departments are still free to identify single titles on their "departmental" serials list from the Library collection to suggest for cancellation in favour of new titles, these lists will be diminished.

A new model is needed, one that ensures that the Library's journal collection is still responsive to changes in the community, while not necessarily being tied to departmental lines in the Library collections budget. For example, the modest savings from the conversion to electronic-only status of journals could be kept in a central fund from which new journal subscriptions could be acquired. However, it is anticipated that demand would exceed supply, and there would still remain the difficulty of dividing up these funds equitably between departments. Over the coming year the Library will be developing proposals for such a new model, and will discuss these with the Senate Library Committee and the departmental Library representatives.

The journal packages involved are

• Wiley Interscience (77 out of 84 titles migrated; package includes access to 400+)
• Kluwer (53 out of 63 titles migrated; package includes access to 650+)
• Project Muse (69 out of 91 titles migrated; package includes access to 200+)
• Canadian National Site Licensing Project - first round resources (163 out of 175 migrated; package includes access to 700+)
• Elsevier Science Direct (286 out of 297 titles migrated; package includes access to 1200+)

The table below shows the amounts moved for each package, by department and Faculty.