As I prepare my budget for 2018, the challenge is always to align the collections we maintain and determine that new content purchased, reflects the research and medical activities of our user community, and supports the mission of the Center. 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 2017, authored by Stephen Bosch and Kittie Henderson (Library Journal, April 19, 2017), the 2018 serials marketplace “will continue to see steady price increases, with no indicators that this will change.  As in previous years, the 6% average price increase seen in 2017 is expected to be much the same for 2018.”  With this in mind, we review each journal 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/subject area, 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 and can be easily and quickly done for our users. While we understand that our user community just wants instant access to the full text, it doesn’t make sense to pay for a subscription, when it would be cost-effective to purchase the article or obtain the article directly from the publisher based on a pay-per-view model.  When acquiring a new title, we go through the same criteria check list as described for when we cancel a title.

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

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services