Spending Reduction for Information Resources
Due to budget constraints and rapidly increasing annual subscription costs, the University Libraries have had to cancel at least $350,000 worth of subscriptions each fiscal year since FY2020-21. These cancellations are necessary to address annual inflation increases of existing subscriptions and to make room for any new strategic subscriptions.
Why Reductions Are Needed
About 85% of our collections budget is spent on subscriptions to journals, databases, and other electronic packages that have recurring costs. Each year subscription prices increase by 5% to 6%. To maintain a balanced budget, we have to cut subscriptions.
For more information about subscription prices, please see Periodicals Price Survey 2022.
Proposed Cancellation List 2023
The Collections Team has identified a number of possible resources to cancel.
We recognize these reductions will impact TXST faculty and students, and we are committed to minimizing that as much as possible. For the cuts, we looked primarily content that overlaps with existing resources or is available relatively easily through alternative means of access (such as interlibrary loan or on-demand purchasing). Other criteria included usage data, cost per use, and centrality of the content to the discipline. We also considered the collective impact of the reductions across disciplines and attempted to be as equitable as possible. Every effort has been made to minimize impact, and therefore the cuts are mainly targeting low-use materials, duplicated content, or subscriptions with high cost per use.
We want to give you the opportunity to provide input on the proposed cuts. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out to Alfredo Pinto, Collections Strategist (ggz26@txstate.edu).
The list will be finalized in Spring 2023. Finalized cancellations will go into effect at various times in 2023 or 2024, depending on the end dates for the licenses.