The Daily Bulletin Archive

Emerald Publishing announced earlier this month that it is discontinuing its Emerald 120 package, which E. H. Butler Library subscribes to for select journals. Subscribers are being asked to move to a new journal package that has more content but is twice as expensive.

As the library cannot sustain these cost increases, library staff members immediately began investigating other options based on faculty publishing patterns and usage over the past three years.

Our solution is to move from the Emerald 120 package to three smaller subject collections that cover more than half our usage. Even this solution may not be sustainable in the long term as it is still significantly more expensive than the Emerald 120 package.

We will use inter-library loan and SUNY resource sharing to replace the bulk of the lost content. In addition, we are exploring an article purchase-on-demand service from Reprints Desk. This service, which integrates with ALLSearch, allows faculty members to request articles and have them delivered quickly as PDFs. The per-article costs can be high, usually more than $30, but for many journals this is more cost effective than subscription products. 

Other vendors are also moving away from cost-effective journal packages to larger and significantly more expensive packages. This means we may need to make further cuts and consider expanding innovative, cost-effective solutions such as those detailed above.

The following journals averaged more than 20 downloads per year and are not included in the smaller subject collections. Individual subscriptions for this content are not cost-effective. The average cost to subscribe to these journals individually is $12,842 each.

• Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal 
• Management Decision 
• International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 
• Reference Reviews 
• Reference Services Review 
• International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 
• Internet Research 
• International Journal of Manpower 

If you have any questions, please contact Joe Riggie, head of information management, E. H. Butler Library.