Feedback Required by September 30

The Dalhousie Libraries are implementing a journal subscription review in 2016/17. While the Collections budget is increased by two per cent annually, vendors and publishers continue to increase the subscription prices by more than two per cent every year. We are assessing whether we can reduce our costs by subscribing only to the journals most essential to the Dalhousie community, instead of subscribing to costly journal packages.

We need your input about the value of the Taylor & Francis package, the only journal package up for renewal in the fall of 2016.

Like all “big deals,” the Taylor & Francis journal package bundles together hundreds of journals at a discounted price. In “big deal” packages, lesser-used titles are bundled with more popular, heavily-used resources, driving up both the number of titles in each package and the cost. The Taylor & Francis package now costs twice as much as it did in 2010/11. The package contains more than 2,000 titles in a broad range of disciplines including architecture, agriculture, engineering, health professions, humanities, law, management, sciences, and social sciences. Last year, 12 per cent of the titles were not used at all. More than 30 per cent of the titles have five or fewer uses per year.

We are considering whether it is possible to subscribe to a smaller number of the essential Taylor & Francis journals. We need your assistance to identify which journals are the most important to you. In addition to your valued input, we will also examine the following indicators:

• usage data
• pricing data
• alternate access options, such as availability in other databases
• which Taylor & Francis journals Dalhousie researchers publish in

Please complete this survey about which Taylor & Francis titles we should retain by September 30: https://surveys.dal.ca/opinio/s?s=33729

A list of Taylor & Francis titles is available at: http://libraries.dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/pdf/library/tf_titles_for_distrib.xls and from the Collection Management website: http://libraries.dal.ca/about/collection-management/strategy.html

We will provide regular updates on our analysis of the Taylor & Francis package on the Libraries’ blog, the LibVine, and on the Collection Management webpage.

Please contact us at Library.Collections@dal if you have questions about this Taylor & Francis Survey, Dalhousie Libraries’ collections budget, or about Dalhousie’s journal subscriptions.