Supporting purchasing and licence management

The issue 

As libraries are facing increasing costs for resources coupled with shrinking budgets, the purchasing of relevant and affordable electronic resources is essential.

Not only do libraries need to obtain the best value for money, but they must also achieve the most beneficial access conditions for their users.

How we can help 

By conducting research-based negotiations with publishers, Jisc Collections has saved the HE and FE sectors a combined total of £196 million for 2016-17. Price increases for major publishers were kept to 3% or lower in a market where standard price increases were estimated to be 5-6%.

We:

• Negotiate with publishers in response to requests from the community
• Do not accept money from publishers
• Act for the benefit of the sector
• Work to obtain the best deals possible
• Offer a well-established pricing structure, based on the Jisc bands, opening up the opportunity to purchase resources to smaller institutions

In the developing world of open access, we also negotiate offset agreements with the aim of limiting the negative financial impact on institutions of licensing journal content and paying APCs for OA articles published in those same journals. We have also recently increased the amount of open access content in our agreements with major publishers.

The use of the Jisc model licence in our negotiations helps to ensure that staff and students can make the most effective use of the online journals included in their offers. We are also working with institutions to improve the experience of purchasing electronic resources for students located at campuses outside the UK through the transnational education (TNE) pilot.

What you can do

Compare accurate data on your entitlements

Knowledge Base+ (KB+) provides accurate data on the journals included within an agreement for you to base your subscription on.

Subscriptions can be compared with each other and you can analyse either changes to content between years, or between different versions of packages from a publisher.

If you want to compare the details of licences for subscriptions provided through Jisc Collections, this can be done in great detail and visually in KB+, evaluating properties like alumni access or interlibrary loan restrictions.

If you have not subscribed to a package through Jisc collections, KB+ can still allow you to compare some key properties of the licence.

Make data driven decisions

When you make purchasing decisions, you can rely on JUSP to provide reliable, COUNTER compliant and rigorously checked usage data.

You need to be sure that you are purchasing the most relevant and useful resources, and the JUSP visualisations allow you to view reports on the most used resources and usage trends over time.

Reports on denials of access can inform your journal backfile purchases and you can even benchmark your usage anonymously against other institutions in the same Jisc band as your institution.