Questions about Big Deal ContractsTheodore C. Bergstrom, Professor of economics, University of California Santa Barbara

Paul N. Courant, Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Economics, University of Michigan

R. Preston  McAfee,  Professor of economics, California Institute of Technology, and VP and Research Fellow Yahoo!

Questions about Big Deal Contracts• Collect information about the prices paid by libraries

and consortia for journal Big Deals• Intend to make this information public and hope to

use it for research on pricing practices in the academic serials publication industry

• Why? “… the benefits to the scholarly community from this resource will make this effort worthwhile.”

• Plan to send a letter to directors of several consortia and a similar letter to a large number of libraries

The Draft Letter, Dear Tom• In an effort to improve the bargaining position of

university libraries with commercial publishers• we are collecting information about contracts that

libraries and library consortia have signed for bundled site license access to the journal packages offered by several major  publishers. 

• We plan to collect this information from a large sample of libraries and consortia and to make it freely available at the web-site, www.journalprices.com

• …American Chemical Society,  CUP, Elsevier, Emerald, OUP, Sage,  Springer, Taylor Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell…

• …send us unredacted copies of the most recent contracts  and also of previous bundle contracts with the same publishers…

• …If any of the following information is not readily found on your  contract with the publisher, we would be pleased if you  would answer as many of the following questions as you can….

1. Total fee that your consortium  paid the publisher in the first year of the contract?  If the contract is for multiple years, what fees are built into the contract for subsequent years?

2. If the contract does not apply to the publisher's entire list, to which of its journals does it give access? 

3. Can you cancel subscriptions from the bundle purchased, and if so, what is the formula determining the amount of money saved by such cancellations?

4. If you do not renew the contract, do you still have access rights to access back issues of this publisher's journals?

5. Could you list all libraries that included in the consortial subscription to each journal?

• We realize that collecting this information  involves a considerable effort, but we believe that the benefits to the scholarly community from this resource will make this effort worthwhile.

• Please let us know if  your contracts with publishers prohibit you from providing any of the information that we request.  If so, we will consider working with you to gain access to this material through  your state's Freedom of Information Act.