ISTOCK, BEE32
Tomorrow (June 12), Florida State University will head into negotiations with the publisher Elsevier to see how it can resolve a pricing issue. Back in April, FSU announced that it would not renew a so-called “big deal” with Elsevier in 2019, due to its “high and ever-increasing cost,” and would instead subscribe to a subset of the most-needed journals. The university’s move represents the latest example of academic libraries walking away from these comprehensive and expensive subscriptions, which include all or most of a publisher’s catalog, and instead signing up for a la carte titles.
Big deals started to become popular in the late 1990s. Prior to these agreements, librarians would only subscribe to the subset of journals they needed. Such a package deal benefits ...
