Factors in the Decision by Individuals and Libraries to Place or Cancel Subscriptions to Scholarly and Research Journals

Under a grant sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Indiana University Research Center for Library and Information Science sought specific information, through a series of survey questionnaires, on the factors which prompted both individuals and libraries to place new subscriptions or cancel existing subscriptions to established scholarly and research journals. The survey sought particularly to evaluate the impact of library action on individual subscriptions and to determine how library decisions were affected by the recent emergence of consortia and networks and the development of cooperative acquisitions policies. The study suggests that the availability of a journal in a library has little impact on the decision by individuals to place subscriptions. However, while the vast majority of cancellations of individual subscriptions are caused by a loss of interest in the journal, a minority of individuals, perhaps 10-15 percent, canceled subscriptions unwillingly for purely financial reasons and now depend on the library for continued regular access, without which they might not have canceled. We found that the financially induced decision by libraries to cancel subscriptions is beginning to be affected by an increasing awareness of consortium and network policies and knowledge of the availability of titles in other libraries.