1. Leaving Elsevier's "big deal": an evaluation of the Italian
National Institute of Health experience inside the
Bibliosan Consortium
Franco Toni
Istituto Superiore di Sanità – Rome, Italy
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2. Introduction
• The first contract of ISS (Istituto Superiore di Sanità) with Elsevier for the e-
journals started 10 years ago
• The journals' collection was at that time about 1,700 titles only 200 of which also in
electronic format
• Elsevier’s journals data in 2002:
– 262 titles
– Total amount of 551,000 EUR for paper
– Additional fee of 7% for electronic version of subscribed titles + 3,5% for the
“Big Deal” (more of 1,400 journals)
• From 2003 till 2005 the fee was reduced at a total of 8% (from the previous 10.5%)
• Terms of the contract:
– Obligation to maintain subscription of all the titles
– No possibility of cutting any journal, other than replacing it with other of
equivalent value
– Price cap of 5% per year
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3. The story continues…
• In 2006 birth of Bibliosan, the System that grouped all the libraries of the research
institutes of the Ministry of Health
• Using funds granted by the Ministry, Bibliosan signed a series of contracts with
many publishers including Elsevier
• The ISS left the previous agreement with Caspur to join the new contract
• The new contract forced ISS to maintain the whole collection of journals
• Between 2002 and 2006 Elsevier acquired other editorial brands (Academic Press,
Mosby, Saunders, etc.) that greatly increased the number of journals and their costs
• In 2006 the situation of ISS was: 336 subscribed journals with a total expenditure
rocketed to 873,000 EUR
• In 2008 the first Bibliosan contract was converted into a long term 5 years
agreement with a “Big Deal” access fixed at 6% of the contract value and price cap
at 5%
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4. The story continues…
• In 2010 the Library had a strong reduction in its budget of more than 30%
• In this year on a assigned budget of 1,6 million EUR the impact of the Elsevier
contract for the subscription of paper journals was 997,000 EUR
• In 2011 the library was forced to leave the consortium access
• A drastic cut in titles was made and the total number reduced to only 185 from the
original 343
• The total amount for the electronic version (leaving the paper copies) of the
journals was fixed at 430,000 EUR (+20% VAT)
• The availability of journals for the researchers of our institute suddenly dropped
from over 2,200 to just 185 (the access to the other 158 paper journals discharged in
2011 was granted for the period 1995-2010)
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5. Downloads Analysis
• Comparison 2009 – 2010: > 3%
(about 3,000 articles)
• Comparison 2010 – 2011: > 14 %
(about 13,400 articles)
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6. Downloads Analysis
• More in depth if we split
the statistic in two
different periods,
January-July and August-
December, respectively
we have a difference of
9.36% between January
and July (that is the
period with free access
from Pubmed) and of
21.95 between August
and December
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec TOTAL
2009 9477 9090 9031 8417 8542 8068 8145 4118 9425 9293 9072 6152 98830
2010 8211 9386 11111 8548 9657 6921 6785 4432 7777 8788 8293 5901 95810
2011 6625 8423 9139 7069 7800 7603 8285 4779 6141 5687 6471 4386 82408
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7. Downloads Analysis
• We cut titles that did not attain 100 downloads per year
• 50% of downloads must be referred to only 25% of the titles
• Top 10 titles account for about 20% of the total
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8. Impact of new deal
• Pros:
– The halving of total expenditure
– A relevant shortcut in the cost per download (from > 10 EUR to 6.3 EUR)
– No relevant differences in the number of document delivery requests (the fall-
off in supply has not produced a parallel increase in the DD service)
– Halving expenditure = – 20% in downloads
• Cons:
– The total number of journals is dramatically decreased: this has caused serious
problems to many researchers
– Themes and disciplines that interest just a few specialized researchers inside
the Institute have been especially penalized
– The loss of access rights to the “big deal” titles for which we paid an handsome
fee in the ten previous years
– The Bibliosan Consortium as well received relevant damage from the
disengagement of the ISS
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9. Some additional considerations
• Extreme inelasticity of the contract model applied by Elsevier: the long-term
contract becomes a sort of trap that compels libraries to maintain their set of
journals unmodified for several years even if their budget is continuously
decreasing
• Librarians must direct their efforts in order to gain a greater flexibility from
publishers in managing the agreements: it is no longer possible to continue to
purchasing the same number of journals as we did ten years ago while the prices are
now doubled
• Need of transparency in the pricing policy: no continuous change in the commercial
policy, no splitting of the collection, no creation of new journal subsets with
additional costs
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10. Conclusions
• The “big deal” contract model can no longer be the reference frame in the
consortium negotiations
• We need to force the publishers to propose new and more flexible agreements
• Stop with agreements including the access to hundreds of unnecessary journals
paying too expensive fees for this
• New models of contracts based on lists of journals selected by discipline and that
take into account the real use of resources such as the number of downloads and
their cost per item.
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11. Thanks for your attention
ftoni@iss.it
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