We conduct a full Journals Collection Review bi-annually. For the Collection Review, we rely on two reports.
The Collection Review report (CR) lists all journals subscribed either individually or in a package. The CR also includes Open Access journals provided by the major vendors who supply our subscriptions. We consider our subscriptions as a means of supporting the growth of Open Access.
We use the CR to identify individual subscription cancellations. Frankly, because the journal budget has not risen in over 10 years, and because we have annually cancelled individual subscriptions in order to stay within budget, there are few individual subs remaining, and most of these have previously been identified as crucial for specific programs.
The Package Level Analysis report (PLAR) is 'rolled up' from the CR. There can be slight discrepancies between the PLAR and a report constructed only at the package level because we are summarizing data across thousands of journals and hundreds of thousands of data matches. The PLAR is useful for the purposes of seeing how journal packages perform relative to one another.
It is not enough to identify package cancellations based on relative performance only. It is also necessary to refer to the CPBI to understand disciplinary and college impacts.
Here is a link to the PLAR version AY23.0 - this is a draft and will go through revisions as we discuss how to use it.
When any journal packages are identified for cancellation, we must also identify any 'add-backs' -- journals included in the packages that students cannot do without, so we add them back as individual subscriptions. To identify add-backs, we use the CR and CPBI.
