What does it cost? Journal package pricing for VCU

VCU Libraries is committed to providing our scholarly community with access to materials critical for research and teaching. We want to ensure that our spending commitments align with community needs, that we are responsible stewards of our budget in a rapidly evolving information landscape, and that we contain and control costs wherever possible. 

The growth in serials cost has outpaced inflation and the growth of most library budgets, including ours, for many years. This growth is often structurally incorporated into contracts that obligate libraries to pay compounded-interest growth of 3% - 6% a year over a contract lasting from three to five years, so that the contract ends up costing as much as 20-30% more at the end of the contract period. In addition, years of mergers and acquisitions among publishers and major vendors have created a handful of oligopolies that now dominate scholarly publishing and drive pricing.

Because of these trends, library collections budgets go increasingly and disproportionately to supporting Big Deals contracts. The Big Deals have steadily crowded out the ability of libraries to acquire journals, books, databases, and other materials from other publishers. 

Approximately 33% of VCU Libraries total collections budget, and more than 50% of the libraries journals budget, is expended for large journal packages from five vendors: Elsevier, Ovid, Sage, Springer/Nature, and Wiley.

The libraries are left with limited options when over half the journals budget is committed to five publishers.  For this reason, each month we collect usage statistics and each year we evaluate important data about cost, usage, and growth trends for our biggest journal vendor contracts. This helps us assess whether large journal packages, often called “Big Deals”, provide good value and represent a sustainable part of our overall investment in information on behalf of the University.

If you have further questions or need more information on costs and use, please contact Karen Cary at kcary@vcu.edu