An Orderly Retreat from the Big Deal: Is it Possible for Consortia?

The struggle to find cost-effective alternative approaches to scholarly publishing resulting in a meaningful change to funding models, as opposed to simply reshuffling the funding deck, continues in full force. One debate within this larger context centers on the merits of the Big Deal which is " any online aggregation of e-content that a publisher, aggregator, or vendor offers for sale or lease at prices and/or terms that substantially encourage acquisition of the entire corpus " (Peters 2001). One problem with any discussion of the Big Deal is how widely the concept is defined from one environment to the next, often creating an " apples to oranges " debate on the benefits and threats. For purposes here, the Big Deal is defined from the consortium perspective, meaning the subscription and purchase of full sets of publishers' journals in electronic format and providing access to member institutions. The purchase is a negotiated contract for a fixed period of years (typically three years) and at fixed rates of cost increases (usually well below the increases on the open market). For a thorough review of the issues and dilemmas for libraries surrounding the Big Deal model there are two required readings. First, Kenneth Frazier, writing an opinion piece published in D-Lib Magazine (March 2001), uses game theory to criticize the Big Deal on the grounds information providers employ " enhanced loyalty, " " disintermediation, " and " changing the rules " to " weaken the power of librarians and consumers to influence scholarly communication systems in the future. " Second, the immediate following issue of D-Lib Magazine (April 2001) contained several letters to the editor taking exception to Frazier's remarks. Most notably, a lengthy letter from the leadership within OhioLINK defends the consortium's engagement in numerous Big Deals and cites benefits gained through negotiations with scholarly journal publishers. 2 Perhaps the most controversial aspects of the Big Deal are the " all or nothing " approach requiring a library or consortium to purchase a single package of all journal titles available electronically from a publisher and the " one way street " of a contracted financial commitment over multiple years. Problems arise when libraries need to make decisions about managing static or shrinking budgets while large percentages of those budgets are committed to multi-year Big Deal agreements. Wouldn't it be easier and less expensive to purchase only those titles from a publisher which …