A new environment for license negotiations: 40% of recent articles in the top publishers' subscription/hybrid journals are freely available online

Our analysis reveals that 40% of recent articles in the subscription and hybrid (not fully Open Access) journals of the top five publishers are freely accessible online. Although just 26% are designated OA on publishers' sites, an additional 14% can be readily found elsewhere. We describe a successful negotiating strategy that accounts for the increasing percentage of freely available articles, the pervasiveness of perpetual access license provisions, patrons' tendency to view full text solely to assess relevance, opportunities for single-article purchasing, and a decline in the importance of research within the undergraduate curriculum. These trends can be incorporated into a new method of calculating cost per use. They also suggest that many libraries are in a better bargaining position now than in the past. In particular, many can now make credible threats to cancel their subscriptions—an outcome that publishers have strong incentives to avoid. This “credible threat” approach, embedded within a coherent bargaining strategy, enabled Southern Illinois University Carbondale to negotiate effectively with three of the five largest publishers. Our negotiations brought a 13-fold increase in the number of journals held, a savings of $337,000 in the total amount paid, and a 94% decrease in price per journal.