As I prepare my budget for 2016, the challenge is always to align the content we renew/purchase so that it reflects the research and medical activities of our user community. Scholarly journals tend to take a fair portion of our allocated content funds and considerable time is spent each year (and during the year) monitoring their use, identifying new research journals, and looking to see where research dollars have been assigned/diverted within the organization.

According to the Periodicals Price Survey 2015, authored by Stephen Bosch and Kittie Henderson (Library Journal, April 23, 2015), the 2016 serials marketplace forecast will see about the same increase in prices as last year, an average hovering between 6% to 7%. With this in mind, we review each periodical to ensure that having an institutional subscription makes sense and that we are getting the highest return on investment.

Before cancelling a journal title, we consider a myriad of factors and often go beyond basic usage metrics, examining: who uses the title, how critical is the title within the discipline, what the journal’s impact factor is, if the journal is indexed in PubMed (or other commercial databases), and whether our authors publish in the title or cite papers from the journal when writing research manuscripts. We also have to note the popularity of these journals among other medical libraries to confirm that obtaining a specific article via ILLiad Document Delivery is not a hardship. We understand that our user community just wants instant access to the full text, however; it doesn’t make sense to pay for a subscription when it would be more cost-effective to purchase the article or obtain the article directly from the publisher based on a pay-per-view model.

This year’s budget preparation is not unlike past budgets, we need to think strategically in order to deliver value and a journal collection that will enhance the work productivity of our users.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services