A journal business model to replace the big deal?

In the mid-1990s the idea of offering library users a large package of journals at less cost than purchasing subscriptions separately seemed too good an opportunity to be missed, not only for librarians but also for publishers. The advent of the ‘Big Deal’ promised a glorious future for users of journals, for publishers, and for librarians. Why has the dream gone sour? As one who has shared and lived through both the euphoria and the scepticism about this particular business model, perhaps I can share some insights, not in order to cast blame (for I may be blaming myself) but in order that lessons may be learned in designing whatever new model for the publication of and access to journal literature is to succeed the Big Deal. On the negative side (I shall end on a positive note), the Big Deal has had unintended consequences. The cost of acquiring large packages of journals has consumed a larger and larger proportion of academic library budgets year by year, to the point where even the largest academic libraries have very little money left for the purchase of single journal subscriptions or research monographs or student textbooks. Not only has this unintended consequence changed the collection development strategies for academic libraries, but it has made life difficult for users of content not included in Big Deals. Humanities users in particular have lost out through the high expenditure on STM journals. Also losing out have been publishers of content not included in the Big Deals. The Big Deal model has not been a winning formula for the publishing industry as a whole. Another unintended consequence is that the large sums of money committed by libraries to Big Deals have made the Big Deal publishers attractive to investors looking for a secure return upon their investment, leading to mergers amongst those publishers who were seen to be benefiting from the Big Deal model. Those mergers have caused librarians many problems (I shall not go into detail because I promised not to cast blame) and have contributed to the current disillusionment with the Big Deal model. More positively, alternative models are being considered for reasons other than that the Big Deal has not lived up to its promise of win/win for all stakeholders. Perhaps the most significant factor is that the Big Deal has not proved able to change sufficiently to meet the new opportunities available to users of journals and their librarians. Yes, I know that journal publishers have invested heavily in the electronic format – and users have benefited from that investment – but in many respects electronic Big Deals are proving as restrictive as their print counterparts. It is a truism that the Internet and the World Wide Web have changed everything, and have certainly provided researchers with opportunities (such as collaborative text-mining or data-mining) that were not available in the print era. How can the Big Deal model cope with the situation where one research group in an institution with one Big Deal is working collaboratively with a research group in another institution with a different Big Deal? How can researchers collaborate on text-mining when they cannot mine from the same pool of content? We are in a totally fluid information environment, and yet the Big Deal model by its very nature operates with fixed silos of content licensed to particular institutions. The open access model is seen to be much better suited to a fluid information environment because it is barrier-free. The World Wide Web is changing business models as well as everything else about journal publishing and use. Before moving on to describe the model I believe will partially or fully replace the Big Deal, it is important to recognize the advantages in the Big Deal model which should not be lost in any change. The Big Deal publishers point to the advantage of a low cost per journal title. To my mind this is not their strongest argument, because it is based upon cost A journal business model to replace the big deal? 69