'Big Deal' Price Caps: Do they really benefit libraries?

Abstract

One of the selling points of multi-year licensing of e-Journal packages is a guarantee that the subscription fee for an institution’s set of subscribed titles will not increase more than a fixed percentage per year for the term of the license. This price cap percentage can also be described as the package inflation rate, because it is often used to determine the exact annual price increase. This study will address the fiscal effect of two big deal price caps for a representative set of institutions in the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium. Historical pricing data and subscription profiles will be used to address some pressing questions: What was the overall inflation rate of journal prices from these two publishers? How much did the price caps save the average library? Were there any cases where a library paid more than it would have for the same set of titles without the contracted price cap? More general questions that may be addressed include: How faithfully and exactly were these price caps implemented by publishers through the subscription agents? How large was the average deficit created over the term of a big deal license? Come and see a data-based analysis of these oft-touted perquisites