On November 4, Oya Y. Rieger and Danielle Cooper will present at the Charleston Conference on the results from their research report on the impacts of ‘Big Deal’ cancellations on discovery and access to journal content. For more information, please visit this site. 

Abstract

The recent Ithaka S+R Research Report ‘ What’s the Big Deal – How Researchers are Navigating Changes to Journal Access’ provided an in-depth analysis of researcher perceptions of the impacts of ‘Big Deal’ cancellations on discovery and access to journal content. A few months after publication of the report, this session will focus on some of the most prominent results of the report and discuss them from the perspective of an Open Access (OA) publisher and explore some of the following questions: 1. Considering the report’s finding that many researchers do not understand how any deal that confers new OA privileges represents an improved level of library value creation and that they are often unclear about the long-term vision for leveraging OA to transform the status quo of scholarly communication, how then can OA publishers help librarians to increase researchers’ awareness about these topics? 2. How does cancelling Big Deals fit into a library’s strategy that needs to balance wider policy agendas – such as moving OA forward – with serving the needs of its community or researchers? How can OA publishers work with libraries to strike the right balance? 3. If so-called transformative deals are transforming only parts of publishers’ portfolios – and not the system as a whole – are they the right strategy for transforming the system to OA compared to unbundling and cancelling big deals to reallocate funds? 4. Is pressure from faculty a reported reason for not unbundling/cancelling big deals? And if so, is there an increasing (and increasingly comparable) pressure from faculty on libraries also for support of (fully/ pure-play) gold OA models? 5. How can OA publishers help, if following cancellation of a big deal, libraries lose insights about faculty demand?