Is the Big Deal Mode of E-Journal Subscription a Right Approach for Indian Consortia ? A Case Study of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect Use at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee

Abstract

Big deal or the consortia site licensing is the most preferred way of e-journal subscription for Indian Consortia be it INDEST or the UGC Infonet. In the big deal model all the journals published by a publisher or hosted by an aggregator on its web site are made available to the consortia members at a so called “highly reduced” price. It has been seen that the librarians throughout the world haves been raising objections to this mode since beginning. There are various concerns which have been identified such as monopoly of the publishers, use of a limited number of titles, effect of citation ranking of journals published by the small publishers and the fear of death of journals published by the developing countries. Though a number of articles have been published on this topic but most of them have been on the qualitative aspects of such deals. There are a few studies that have been conducted on quantitative aspects. In this paper a study of use of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect at IIT Roorkee has been presented which clearly shows that a very limited number of titles are frequently used in the Institute. This data clearly indicates that the Big Deal mode of subscription is not at all in the favour of the consortia. Supports an alternate model for subscription which should be based on the fixed fee access to the limited set of journals which are frequently used and pay for use for the journals which are less frequently used.