 Good afternoon everybody. I say I'm David Prosser, I'm Executive Director of RRUK and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this webinar this afternoon where we're going to be looking at UNSARP, a tool to aid the evaluation of big deals. Big deals have been controversial even since their introduction which is now probably about 20 years ago. While they provide convenience and improve costs per title, they also type in every increasing proportion of libraries acquisition budgets, reducing the flexibility that institutions have in managing those budgets and have helped drive even greater consolidation in the market. So there were already concerns but then the last few months and the COVID crisis has exacerbated that. I know that many institutions around the UK and Ireland are looking at modeling really significant budget cuts and those cuts such that there isn't a lot to take, a lot of room in which to make those cuts because of the ever-increasing amount of money that big deals take. The UK high-level general negotiation group which RRUK sits on has written to publishers recently, as I'm sure you know, looking for 25% price cuts for general big deals. It'll be interesting to see what response we get from the publishers. And also we're at the start of the process to negotiate the next big deal with Elsevier and the current deal ends in December of next year of 2021 but we know it will take many months to reach a satisfactory conclusion for that deal. Over the past 10 years really we've been looking at issues around the data needed to make decisions on big deal. Today those conversations are led by our collection strategy network and it's that network that decided it would be useful to learn more about UNSUB and its capacity to aid decision-making. But we realize that this is a much wider issue than just the RRUK members and so we've opened up this webinar to a wider audience and we're very pleased to see so many of you joining us today. All that being said I want to welcome Heather Pimovar to talk to us about UNSUB. Heather's been speaking for about 30 odd minutes and they'll have a question and answer session after that and we're hugely grateful to Heather especially because she's on the west coast of the States where it's just past eight o'clock in the morning and so we're particularly grateful that she's made this time to to talk through UNSUB with us and with that I shall hand over to you Heather. Fantastic thanks so much David I am absolutely thrilled to be talking to you. We were hoping to be at UKSG and needless to say that didn't work out so to the extent that this is seeing you and getting a chance to talk I'm really glad about it. Please do ask questions we will leave a lot of time for questions in fact we can even go over time if need be. During the conversation during my talk do ask those questions in the Q&A and they'll get answered at the end but that way you won't forget the questions the questions are pretty key to understanding everything. Okay with no further ado I am going to share my screen hopefully the right screen okay does that look good can you guys see that okay I'm assuming no news is good news okay here we go so what I'm here to talk with you about UNSUB this is oh sometimes you don't have a picture of me so this is what I look like and this is the other half of UNSUB Jason Preem please if we ever do run into each other at UKSG or anywhere else do say hi we'd love to catch up okay so I work for the non-profit our research I'm one of the two founders along with Jason we've been around for about eight years doing various things where we are a non-profit based in the U.S. although currently live in Canada dual citizen which is wonderful but that's a touchy subject so maybe we'll talk about that anyway everything we do is open source open data open access we're a non-profit because our goal is to accelerate the transition to open science and we try to practice what we preach with our infrastructure so that's a little bit about who we are and what we believe in but I'm not going to be talking about that part that much more because although that's cool it's actually about to get even cooler with the functionality and so put on your seatbelts so you might already be using some tools that we make so we are the people behind Unpaywall which as you might know is a complete open well it's an attempt to be a complete it's the most complete open and legal index of open access with very high accuracy that has driven its integration into a lot of different systems so you might already be using Unpaywall if you use web of science scopus pro quest dimensions and so on all of the open access links in those systems come from the Unpaywall database also you yourself might have Unpaywall turned on in your link resolver if you don't you should it's free most almost all I think major link resolver vendors have the ability to configure it so that if a patron goes to a paper and you don't have it in your subscription holdings it checks the Unpaywall database sees if we know of a legal good quality open access version if so the patron will be redirected there and only if one of those does not exist does it go to your interlibrary loan page so you may have that turned on if not go ahead and turn that on right now and and help unleash the power of open access so we've been doing that for several years now um and we have are now using the Unpaywall data in a different product right I forgot to mention the browser extension maybe a different way you're using it so a quarter of a million people actively use the browser extension it's available for chrome and firefox there are lots of browser extensions out it out these days ours is really pretty though so you should go give it a shot it also powers the data behind um pretty much everybody else's browser extension for what it's worth so this Unpaywall database we pull together um probably data from your institutional repository actually using your OAI PMH endpoint we've got thousands of those endpoints and we harvest them daily and then we um add on value to that by detecting if there is actually a full text an open um no registration required um free full text copy the paper at that repository determine its version and so on its license and pull that into a database we merge that with information we've got about gold and hybrid and bronze all the flavors of open access you could want uh and metadata from crosswalk that's what that Unpaywall database is for what it's worth um we wrote a paper using the data from the Unpaywall database here um and this paper was in peer jf years ago uh we wrote a pre-print um for using this data to forecast uh just late last year what we found in doing those studies with that Unpaywall data is that right now sort of at the end of 2019 beginning of 2020 in non-covid times which is probably what we'll go back to after COVID I'm guessing though nobody knows of course is that about half of all article views that researchers try to do are actually available as free open access so half not papers because that's only so interesting right half of what people actually want to read at the time they want to read it is available as open access and even better in five years time that will be 70 percent so that's open access is really coming of age right when we start to get those numbers it also means that right now only half of the articles that people want to read need to be purchased in order to read them quickly and conveniently and in five years that will be only 30 percent the value of a journal subscription is collapsing and that is obviously why journal subscription prices keep dropping and this is where if we were in person you would laugh and you would hear the person beside you laugh and it would sound like laughing instead of the stone cold silence I am currently hearing but I'm hoping you're laughing oh anyway so they're not dropping but they should be and so especially and that was true you know this product launched in November that was true in November it's all the more true now um everybody's belt tightening so what we want to do is help you cancel your big deal with confidence you might need to cancel your big deal but it's scary you might not know if you want to cancel your big deal but you want to check it out and you want some data to help you know whatever decision you make to do with confidence so that's really what the tool I'm going to be demoing for you today is all about it's really looking at cost versus convenient fulfillment because of course libraries were committed to getting patrons what they need we'll get it by interlibrary loan we'll get it to them best we can so it's not so much fulfillment as convenient fulfillment that's what actually carries the bulk of the cost and the way that's often measured is through cost effectiveness and cost effectiveness measure through cost of use so that's what the tool indeed uses to measure subscription value so traditionally cost of use just involves usage as measured by downloads and cost just the cost of subscriptions and that's what goes into standard cost of use to determine um subscription value what we're doing is bringing to that some more data so we're saying in addition to usage what we're really trying to get with usage is the value of the data sorry the value of the journal to your institution right and downloads is one metric of that value another is how many times do people in your institution site papers in that journal because that's kind of an that describes value right how many times do authors in your institution author papers in that journal so we're we're adding all those things into usage in this sort of more advanced cost per use metric that we will be talking about in addition to cost of just the subscription if you don't subscribe the cost isn't zero right because we still have a cost of interlibrary loan so another refinement we're making to standard cost per use is we're using net cost of a subscription and that's the cost of a subscription minus the cost of what the ILL would be if you didn't actually subscribe to that title and finally we're adding um instead of just cost per use we think it's important it's cost per paid use so that you're not paying for free so if an article is available open access as the increasingly is in your perpetual access back file in places like research gate or something like that um you might you shouldn't consider that the money you're paying the publishers for that is money well spent so we're excluding that from the cost per use metric to get your real subscription value now I do want to take before we go further it's really important as I've been saying that that OA is open at the time of use back file at the time of use that's complicated obviously because uh green embargoes mean that papers are often not away during that first year and of course people most want to read papers during their first year so there's a bunch of curves that are going on and we're taking care of all that math that's true for back file too because your back file if you cancel the journal subscription and the perpetual access stops that perpetual access is really valuable um the first day and the second day but becomes decreasingly valuable as its only holds older and older articles right so there's a bunch of like complicated math that's going and modeling that's going into um uh getting this right and we're taking uh all that into account in in this forecast model which i'm going to demonstrate so it's a model projecting the costs and the fulfillment for every journal for the next five years because you don't want to know the open access use right now you're looking at making decisions that will affect the next five years now of course the next five years are a little tricky a little trickier to predict now than they were in november to be fair um but we think that but one thing we're doing actually is continually updating the model with the best available evidence we've got so the goal is to have an accurate as we can uh prediction of the next five years okay so we create this forecast model um by data that you bring and data that we bring the data that you bring is a counter file and um then optionally customized uh prices and your own customized list of what you've got perpetual access to and that's it um and we just need the counter to start the other ones we can use defaults um and the data that we bring to it is open access data from unpaywall and citation and authorship data from the open data set that microsoft provides so it's like google scholar but or scopus or what or so on but they have not put an emphasis on their ui um like those other companies have instead they've put an emphasis on making their data openly accessible for tools like us to build on so that's uh that's how that works it's called unsub you haven't heard here's a quick screenshot but actually i'm going to give you a demo so i'm just going to blow by these right now um to cut to the chase it costs a thousand dollars us per year right now so that's what it's cost for the last six months um we've actually it it does it is not dependent on um bands or anything at the moment but we are reevaluating that because we're trying to make sure that we can scale that it's remains a super good value um we want everybody to have this data that's really important to us um and so we've actually got a survey where we're trying to get the community's feedback um about our pricing right now it's a thousand dollars a year and we're determined to keep it um accessible to everybody to get started all it costs all it takes is one counter file 300 libraries are using it most of those are in the us right now um i think because that they had a few conferences before uh before everything hit unfortunately um but some uk universities are using it as well as um all universities in canada and some australian ones um making up those 300 universities there is um about half of that is individual universities and the other half is consortia uh suny was one of the the state university of new york is an um sort of a consortium of 60 six zero universities in the state of new york they were one of our earliest users and they were in the midst of an elsea fair negotiation and they actually decided to walk away from their big deal um a few months ago and they talked about this publicly you can read about this um and they're saving five million dollars and said that unpaywall um or unsub is what it actually was i had changed the conversation for us so they found it really useful uh and so that's one of our um most clear testimonials we think that can um suggest you take a look so let's go take a look you can follow along if you want to go to unsub.org right now everything i'm about to show you is publicly available uh we're also on twitter at at unsub underscore or g um okay okay so here we are at unsub.org um and we are going to try the demo so you can you can follow along home if you want so i'm going to type in my email address i'm giving it an email address i hasn't seen before so we can see a clean fresh demo not one where i fiddled okay so we're in so what this demo is is um it's really what you would see if you were to get a custom dashboard customized with your counter file um but it's for an unnamed us university it's a fairly large university with a med school in case that helps you interpret their results um but a bunch of our customers um are big are very big and a bunch of our customers are small um unsub can really uh help everybody also what it's worth if you don't have a big deal if you've already um negotiated if you already have gone to ala cart subscriptions needless to say unsub can still be relevant to help you find tune that um subscription list so if you've got questions about specifically how can that work uh feel free to ask them but i think you'll be able to put your imagination hat on during this demo if that's your situation and um and see how that would work as well okay so here we are at this demo university and um the publisher that set up in the demo is Elsevier right now unsub supports Elsevier out of the box uh Wiley as well though you got to upload your data through us for another couple of days until we um ship that code update that'll let you update the code yourself uh for Wiley spring or nature is coming next and all other publishers uh over the course the next year in order based on priority for our customers so if you've got some deals that are coming up that are important to you uh let us know that matters to us because we really we're in this we're a non-profit we're in this to help you and to help librarians um have a data balance with publishers and make the changes they need to make to make the scholarly communication system nimble to change that's our goal okay right now we're going to click on Elsevier and the tool actually um covers both the read and the publish side of uh subscription of a publisher negotiation now it doesn't cover them equally the focus at the moment is on the read side so it's on the subscription side but we do have a little bit that estimates your um apc spend as well i'm going to cover that at the end it's right here um so i'll come back to that and and cover that um but what we're going to do is dive in uh right now to the most interesting guts which is to model what does it look like if you were to walk away from your big deal so we click on a scenario the idea is that you can save different scenarios uh with different assumptions and settings and compare and contrast so it can help you as a decision support tool okay and here we are so this is the main the main page um that is giving you some data so let me give you an explanation of what data we're seeing i'll actually start here in this second bar this instant fulfillment it says at the top 61 percent so starting at the bottom of that the bottom part of that bar says um 35 percent open access what does that mean what it means is over the next five years so so this all of the scenario is modeling the next five years and then we look at it annually so the average of the next five years because people are used to thinking annually so it's a forecast and then then we look at it annually and you can dig into the detailed years in various ways i can show you but so in the next five years of all the uses so a combination again of downloads citations and partnerships we can talk about all the uses 35 percent of them will be available open access at the time of the request for this large us university so that's the first takeaway which is actually pretty exciting i should say actually sorry i i got a bit ahead of myself this is elsewhere it's everything in their big deal that elsewhere is currently publishing that isn't an open a gold open access journal because it's not relevant for a big deal and so on right so that's 1855 uh journals that have publicly available prices on the elsewhere site and then you can upload your own custom quoted prices if you want to get the last 100 or so that are only available custom prices so so across all those 1855 journals all the uses to them 35 available open access in addition to that we estimate about another 25 percent are available perpetual access now that depends a bit on your own perpetual access holdings but it is on for especially for large universities it tends to be about about this level and then as i said you can customize it to get it more precise for you so what that means is 35 plus 26 gets you to 61 percent of all uses are actually fulfilled already instantly even if you cancel your big deal and don't subscribe to anything so that's that's a pretty that's a pretty interesting takeaway yeah now what what about those 39 percent um that aren't well as we know um authors if they run into a paper they can't quickly get if they actually didn't really need that paper they'll go google and find another paper right or maybe they'll ask the author or maybe they'll learn how to scihub or maybe they will um make an interlibrary loan request and so what this tool is doing is it's modeling interlibrary loan requests at the rate that they do happen in real life so um the literature and people's experiences suggest that about one out of every 20 times somebody tries to get a paper and they can't get it easily they make an interlibrary loan request if your interlibrary loan is uh super well marketed and your researchers love it and they do it even more uh that's a parameter you can change um for example but we are modeling right now uh that sort of literature based default all of the defaults we've done we've tried to set them to the um literature based default so we're assuming that one out of every 20 of these requests will be an interlibrary loan request and then we further assume that fulfilling an interlibrary loan request costs 17 us again that's the literature value but if that's not what it costs you uh you can change that so you is putting all this data together about the fulfillment rate and the cost and so on we estimate that um fulfilling interlibrary loan requests if they walk away from the big deal and subscribe to nothing will cost about 230 thousand dollars uh us and that's actually one tenth of what they were paying for their big deal which was about two million dollars us okay so that that starts to get that snapshot of what does it look like if i walk away from my big deal right how what does it look like in terms of fulfillment what does it look like in terms of cost now let's say you actually are um you want to save some money but you don't need to save that much money you want to trade off some money for some more convenience for your faculty and students right and so you can do that by subscribing to some journals a la carte and so up here we can model subscribing to some journals so i'm just going to start clicking up in this models subscribing to eight nine ten eleven journals and it's modeling subscribing to them with the most cost cost effective journal first so the one with the lowest cost per use so let me show you what this graph is right here it's a histogram where this x axis right here don't be scared by histograms if you don't like histograms it's not that bad you can do it so this along the bottom here is the cost per use from very low to very high and the very low one nice nerdy detail is our version of cost per use can actually be negative if a journal is actually more expensive to fulfill by interlibrary loan than it would be to fulfill via subscription the cost per use that is actually negative so cell has a very high use for many universities in a relatively low subscription price so in this scenario it's got a negative cost per use all the way up to the journal of hospitality leisure sports and tourism well it's not a good time for them is it anyway they have a very high cost per use and then there's some more journals down here that have the even higher cost per uses but if so so they're all just sorted in order from lowest from the best cost effectiveness to the worst cost effectiveness so if i just keep clicking up here i keep pretending to subscribe to journals with the most cost factor one first so let me just press and hold this down till i've saved half um my big deal price so right now i'm saving a million dollars and look i'm only running into inconvenient accesses 15 percent of the time one five percent of the time and i've saved half my subscription budget um and it we have indeed baked in that those 15 percent that your researchers are not out to lunch nope they can make interlibrary loan requests and they can make them as often as um you want them to so here is that interlibrary loan piece you can see it's uh less than it was before right because we're modeling subscribing to some more things here's those parameters so interlibrary loan if we say the interlibrary loans actually going to happen twice as often 10 of the time you'll see that this um it jumps up slow slow there so it now costs twice as much uh sorry there are twice as many interlibrary loan requests now and so it doesn't cost you twice as much so these parameters here you can explore them i'm not going to go through each one but the goal is that we've um tried to make as a parameter as a setting anything that either we've had to make an assumption or you might want to um the end and your your um university actually has a real value for and maybe our values different like the transaction cost maybe yours is cheaper maybe yours is more expensive maybe you want to model document delivery within so maybe you want to make it be 25 or 30 dollars and so you're assuming um uh document delivery rather than interlibrary loan so so the parameters are so that you can do it to your university settings and then we've also made as a parameter various settings uh where you might just want to try different risk profiles so something that's very conservative something that's not conservative and some examples of that are do you want to include research gate hosted content so if you're really up against it in terms of money maybe you do if in the other hand you're deciding to take more of a principled stand about open access maybe you want to look at what it looks like without that so we've really tried to make as a parameter everything um that makes this model ring true for you in your university uh that's our goal I've mentioned briefly um the institutional weight that sorry the citations and authorship's being part of usage the way that we do that is we give it a weight so we assume that one citation counts like 10 downloads and one authorship counts like 100 downloads but if you don't like that you want to experiment with different things you can click and change that that gives you a sense of how customizable this is now this picture is very oh you can this picture is pretty but um if you're like me you want to get into the nitty-gritty details and so we have you covered on the nitty gritty details you can look at the table view instead and so here there's a row for each of those journals that was just a dot in the histogram you can sort it by cost of use and so here's the most cost effective one um at the top if we want to um for example add in authorship's so let's see here impact authorship's so maybe what we want to do is we want to say let's model subscribing to 100 things but we want to make sure that that we want to understand really cover everything we want to so we're subscribing to 100 things the most cost effective 100 journals is what we're doing right now now we want to see does that cover the journals where our authors are publishing papers so we can add this column for authored papers and then sort descending and so the for this university they publish in the spying journal most frequently for all else of your subscription journals and then everything else a bit less than that now this one the international journal of radiation oncology and so on they publish in quite frequently but it is relatively expensive so it's not one of the most 100 most cost effective journals so it's not picked up by the quick and dirty modeling we just did but what if we do want to subscribe to you can actually um subscribe to things just one off so I just did a command click and now it's subscribed and you could do that um for example to all of your high authored papers if you wanted to or one use case that people have talked about is they um have a very um active nursing program so let's just look at the nursing journals um and see maybe um maybe you have a faculty member who's very active on the board of the journal of neonatal nursing so even though it's not particularly cost effective even though it doesn't bubble to the top it's good for your university to subscribe to that that that's real right that's your job to know that and to do that so um again you could subscribe to that you could also go ahead and click on it um to get more details so here it shows you the cost per use um has a combination of download citations over the last five years authorship over the last five years and so on um and there's also some uh nitty gritty timeline data here so uh how much open access what kinds of open access things like that um this pain isn't the prettiest right now we're working on making it uh better and have some good timeline graphs in the future um yeah okay i think that is covering most of this section um you can export a spreadsheet you can save this scenario view and copy it and then um save a different one with different subscription lists and different parameters and so on um to play around so that that's a quick overview i think of um how you can um use this as a decision support tool to see what would it look like um to walk away from your from your big deals before i forget let me go back and give you a quick overview of that apc piece so here i'm going to dive in here what this is saying is that for this university they're spending about 94 thousand dollars a year on um open access to Elsevier so now we're going to dig in and see the details of that so there's that 94 thousand dollars a year so here's a list of all of the journals where authors from this institution have published papers that are either gold away or hybrid away so again gold away is when the whole journal is open access so and hybrid away is when that not the whole journal is but just that specific paper is so we flag what type it is of the journal so this is all the journals that are published by Elsevier that these authors are published in and here's the apc price the current apc price for published article processing charge for those who might not know that's the cost that that this journal charges authors to make their paper available open access and what this tool isn't looking at is that money coming out of their research grant is it coming out of their institutional away fund we're not paying any attention right in in this tool in where that money is coming from it's more just how much money are people in the university paying to Elsevier to publish open access because that number is can obviously be useful if you are looking at a reading publish agreement but also frankly if you're just looking at a subscription agreement as part of your negotiation and to double check the publishers about their double no double dipping claims and so on anyways that's the apc charge now since that needs to be paid just once per article but often articles have more than one author including from more than one institution it's a little tricky to figure out how that should be allocated across institutions and so we're doing a I can talk more about the pros and cons of this and and the rationale behind it but we're currently dividing that equally across all of the institutions on the paper and and uh allocating the apc price based on the fraction of the authorship list that is for your institution so what we're what we've got here for each row is how many papers were published in that journal in the last on average uh every year over the last five years so the reason it's called a decimal point in it is it's on average over the last five years and this is when we take into account that fractional authorship so what proportion of the authorship list was an author from your institution and then we multiply that uh by the apc price to figure out the apc dollars spent uh on that journal by authors in your institution that year so let me say um uh that the us and canada has not had very clean data um in this regard and so this pain is particularly used for them now if you're a part of the open apc project for example or are otherwise tracking this apc data through your accounting department in your university this pain may not be very useful because it is an estimate um and you may have more um accurate ways but for people without those estimate it gets them in the ball park uh and gets conversation started so that's a little bit of uh overview on that page now one thing that i should have covered first because all of you've probably been wondering um but let me let me at least do it now um is that obviously i've been talking about us dollars um and right now the tool only shows things in us dollars um but we are uh want to make this useful to people and prioritize our features based on uh customers feedback and so obviously it would be useful if it were um showed pounds and eventually euros as well um in it and so if this is if that's a high priority feature for you we'd love to hear about that um and whether it's directly an email or on our user discussion group uh we definitely can we're a small team uh moving fast on this and prioritizing features which isn't the easiest so i'm not sure when it would happen um but certainly if there's a great big interest in that um and it and it was required um it moves it up the up the priority list okay yeah i think that is uh there's there's help as you as you look around do take a look at the knowledge base help um there is a guided tour um on the front on the landing page there's a video uh that actually just does mostly what i did but uh if you want to share that with others you're welcome to yeah and i think that's it i'd love to answer your questions well thanks hella that was uh brilliant um really really interesting i think the fact about the the proportion of downloads or the amount of use or views that's open access is really interesting because traditionally we've always looked at the number of journals or even papers but actually looking at it from from from from usage is is is really interesting um we have a lot of questions and actually some of them you answered as you're going through so there was some discussion about uh research gate and other sources and you want to include that and i think you you pick that up um there's a specific question about um the counter data and the fact that a lot of libraries are moving to counter five reports yeah yeah it's a great yep that's a great question so when this tool launched in november counter five was not uh was not universally used um at that point and so it launched with counter four we're in the midst of moving to counter five that's obvious but it's not quite as easy as just um importing that new that new format because also the metrics have changed there a little bit right what's what's actually counted and we want to make sure that we adjust we do the right um quality assurance and make our parameters all match so that we can give people insight into what does this mean now and uh as a result we think it'll probably take another uh month or two before we've got counter five support yeah but in the meantime we are actively using counter four and the jr1 reports yeah okay thank you um this can you say something about the you know you got the five year window and so i assume you model such that in five years time a smaller proportion will be fulfilled by back files because exactly back files have a specific that's exactly right yeah that's exactly right okay okay that's the biggest you know you're your finger on it that's the biggest um uh thing that will change over the course the five years that said we also model other things changing so one is um as we as I think people on the call know even better than I do the big deals cost more and more every year right as does a subscription price for a journal so we've got parameters where you can put in the percentage growth per year for both your big deal so we can average that in as well as the a la carte subscription cost growth so that's another thing that's changing over those five years um a thing that we're not modeling yet but we hope to roll out soon is that the journals are publishing a different amount of papers and every year and so some journals that are publishing more and more papers we we should model that they're going to you you will in the future be getting more views from them than you are right now and the ones that are um getting decreasing number of papers maybe because a lot of their authors are publishing in gold open access journals right now right that's one of the I think that's one of the open access changes that are happening all those papers being published in gold away journals they're not just new papers that weren't elsewhere their papers that would have been most of them are papers that would have been published in subscription journals are now in gold open access journals so it's really important too to model that some journals are actually decreasing the number of papers they're publishing every year and so over the course the next five years the subscription price for them will become less and less a good deal so I get that so I'm giving you that taste not because that's in the code right now it's not actually but we we're um prioritizing getting an accurate um estimate and we want to keep making it more and more accurate over time so one of the reasons that it's a yearly subscription instead of a one-off fee um there's two reasons really one is because you've got multiple publishers that you'll want to negotiate for um and and those happen at different in different years um and and even after you've if you've walked away from your big deal it's still useful to see um what should you do now and the other reason that it's a it's a um ongoing fee is we intend to continue to make this model be as accurate as possible and that's true with covid uh realizations that's true with open access realization what how does the modeling change if there's um uh some open access um uh changes that weren't expected and so on so we're we're continuing to keep it um up to date on that and so people who so so a continuous subscription lets you get our best take sort of at any point in time um there was a couple of questions about currency but you've addressed those yeah I guess in the meantime that if you're in the UK you could just ignore you could just pretend those dollar signs were pound signs and it's a good question and you know what we should that so we've got a user discussion forum and as most things are it's a little quiet right now so if anyone's feeling bold and brave it would be a real good a lot of discussions about using unsub and about walking away for big deals are happening in small groups I think right and there's some value in that and I can see why people might not want to make all those conversations in public but I also think there is some use for some of those conversations to be in public particularly around here's what I found from unsub or what did you guys think when you looked at this does that make sense or how did you were a small institution did you guys notice this so we're hoping to by making a publicly available user discussion group that some of those conversations can start to happen in an open place where we can all learn from each other and I think it people might think well then the publishers will hear but the publishers know anyway so that's not like let's just own that right so um so anyway the a currency discussion so it's little hacks around how to best handle the currency discussion will be a great thread in that user discussion group so if anyone wants to start that that would be fantastic the user discussion I don't think I put a link here I'll add it to a chat later but you can also just google unsub user discussion group it's a google group but I'll make sure so you're having people who aren't already sort of customers yes yes for sure if for prospective customers very happy for you to join great question yeah and ask questions that would be relevant for you yeah absolutely um and and so just more a little bit more concretely on the um currency so I'm Canadian so for what it's worth if your nose is a bit out of joint but I keep talking about US dollars I've been there I've lived my whole life too so I'm right there with you but that's our pragmatic reality right now um so so the default prices we're using for Elsevier are all in US dollars so one thing you'd have to do if you want to digest pretend they're all in pounds is actually upload a price sheet that's all in pounds okay now that's actually sort of the step we need one of the steps we need to do to make it support pounds but if in the meantime if you want if you've got a price list and you want to upload it to your account specifically you don't need to wait for us you could just do that and then um and then write on and then just treat everything else uh like uh like uh like it's in pounds all of the math does indeed just work out just the same yeah I mean that that issue perhaps leads into another one that a few people have spoken about is that you know the the consortial nature of the purchase in the UK and the fact that you work with JIS yeah that might there be some things that have done centrally and I know that you're you're talking with just yeah yeah we are yeah relatively early days I think yeah relatively early days but I think also people know it's a timely issue so I think um I think people who are listening have a few choices they could go ahead and buy right now and if you buy right now the price is a thousand dollars US you can buy it with a p card and have it today you can't quite have your data uploaded today but you can have your data uploaded real soon in just a few days so that's one choice another choice is you could wait and see what we announce uh with JISC and the ability to buy a subscription through JISC now we're figuring that out and I don't know the timeline of that I don't even know if it'll happen um but but for clarity that isn't that is a option and that is actually how it happened with Canada uh with CRKN uh the they bought subscriptions anyway which is a different different thing than JISC but yeah so so um and I think that's could that's useful to do even if JISC were to buy a version that's just for JISC for example that lets JISC do its negotiations with maybe with your data in it but there's a version there that maybe JISC is looking at um but you don't have the ability to do that fine tuning so I think it it really just sort of depends on uh on on the on the timeline um people are looking at and maybe how much autonomy they want uh and it is early days uh with JISC and we're happy you're you can ask JISC about that um you can ask us too yeah great um one of the things about the consortial view of this would be that you could imagine a group of universities coming together and saying okay well you know we will we will purchase these hundred Elsevier titles if you probably if you purchase those hundreds yeah that's true so and and do interlibrary loan so one thing that people have said and I kind of love this question because it definitely presupposes a really big change in the world which is great right people like but if everybody does this then there won't be anybody left to interlibrary loan from and first of all okay that sounds like a pretty good problem if we're really there in some ways I mean not not in other ways but that's a pretty you know that's a pretty big change where we are right now but then yeah for sure let's figure out how to work with that right that means all of a sudden there's a tool that's needed to let let people figure out how we can split uh this you know across universities or whatever so the tool doesn't support that it doesn't support that itself right now but I do agree you people could do it like that right now they could say look here's the journals I would subscribe to I've exported here's the journals I would subscribe to and and sort of merge spreadsheets and say okay well you take the top half I'll take the bottom half that's totally true okay yeah and then thinking in a little bit more about there's some specific questions around um uh Elsa and the big deal and the fact that in the UK sell press titles aren't included so this uh you I guess you can exclude those from yeah good question so so that hasn't been uh um it hasn't been very often requested yet with the customers we've had to exclude titles we've often done it when people have walked away from their big deals already and they just want to look at the titles they currently subscribe to and and work sort of within that universe so we do have that ability to say for you to send us a list of your issn's in a spreadsheet and say make my dashboard only show these so you could make you could send us that list that doesn't include the sell titles um yeah and indeed if it turns out that everyone in the UK is in the same situation we certainly don't want to need to everybody in the UK to do the exact same thing we'll try to figure out a way to make it more convenient so yeah let us know okay that's great um the answer the question's about subscription costs I think um aggregators uh yeah like when when you're getting access to some back files through um through those and yeah you've obviously heard that question before how how do you handle that yeah that's a great question and the truth is we're not so and I think there's there's two different questions maybe one is when you um the aggregators come into one is where what do you do with their usage metrics so if things are going in clinical key for example which is a different way of of place the usage metrics can sort of go in uh elsewhere how do we bring those in and a separate thing is what if we've got back file uh through JSTOR or or so on so both of those we're actually still are still works in progress for us partly because we don't we want to make sure we bring them in in a way that facilitates this good decision making so I think that for the ones that are back file that's going to be pretty easy actually because if what we're modeling is I want to look at my Elsevier subscriptions I'm just going to assume I keep subscribing to the thing that's providing you that back file then then I think we'll just hold that part we'll load that we'll turn on that you've subscribed to those things and then let you fiddle with your Elsevier and sometime if there's enough um interest maybe we could let you fiddle this too but that's not where we'll start I think we'll just let you turn this on and fiddle this now that for what it's worth um we're been getting that question quite a bit and our timeline looks like the summer I think probably for for facilitating that right um there's a really interesting um almost strategic question um it's come in which is about um green and so if you've with a larger percentage of green access then your cost per download will probably be higher because you're getting a lot of the usage through through and then you may decide that you don't want you don't want to you want to cancel that one and then you almost you're almost penalizing the good behavior of that journal so that journal is saying yes you can have lots of green access but then you're canceling it so is there have you thought of yeah it's not really a modeling question so much it's more a big question we have thought of that and I think what we're what we think is the right answer to that is to give fly brands the data and let and trust them to make the decisions and depending on your financial situation and it's it might be the right time for you to uh subscribe to those green oa journals even though they're not the most cost effective journals because you want to support them or maybe it's not and and so our we don't think the right answer to that is to just not tell anybody because maybe they'll actually cancel things because some things got a lot of open access nope let's tell them so uh so we're revealing here how much green open access things have and so people can and perhaps should indeed take that into their um into their consideration furthermore it's whether or not it's a society journal so even if it's not green oa maybe we don't want to take the maybe we don't want to prioritize cancelling society journals um right now even if they're cost effective so there actually was not a good um resource either open or closed for what else to be your journals or widely journals or society journals and in the fall we actually crowdsourced one so i think that some people listening are actually contributed to that which is pretty exciting so we just had this great big long list of journals when people scoured the internet and decided whether it was a society journal or not and we since released that cc0 for other people to build on and and that data is being pulled in here so that you can factor in um is it so this one's not a society journal but perhaps it is and that may be either a tiebreaker or you might allocate five percent of your budget where you'll just support the journals that you think deserve to be supported that kind of thing okay so it's it's very um at the journal level you can sort of pick and choose and make individual decisions and i guess like you're saying about whether or not you know your your dean of medicine is um is on the editorial board also yeah well you might want to see a little bit depending on how like you're doing the most um i know sorry just one sec because that's real life right and we really want to make this tool useful so one thing i'm not quite sure i've stressed enough so let me stress it one more time we would love to make this useful so if you're looking at it and you're like you know what this is almost useful but we would love to hear the but so send us an email um and tell us because we really want this tool to to help um make these make these decisions yeah um i know that we're pushing time but there was also a few questions that came in about the apc sides of things so yeah if you're happy to continue for a little while um i don't know what this says all the questions about uh subscriptions came in the in the q&a and all the questions about apcs came in the chat i don't know if it's a different different types of people i'm not quite sure what that is so you mentioned um the the um um the split in authors so the alpha numbers and so it's like a lot of people when they think about paying apcs are very concerned about who the corresponding author is yeah so that's maybe you know normally it's the corresponding author whose institution will pay is that something that you can sort of feed in or is it an author percentage split that you would do yeah great question so right now it is just an even split and we so i think it is true that corresponding authors is often the one who pays that is like depends on the field but i think that is often true um there's been some studies that looked at different um ways of modeling it by the corresponding author the first author the last author and even split of authors um and all and on any given paper it makes a difference in the amount in where it's allocated but across a lot of papers and across a lot of journals it tends to uh be um evened out now it's not even out entirely because some very prestigious institutions for example might disproportionately be the corresponding author compared to a less prestigious institution because the corresponding author is often the one with all the research funding and so on right so it doesn't entirely weigh out and so it's a it's a reasonable question i think one way um so because of that we would actually like to have corresponding author in here unfortunately that data is not available it it's not captured in a standard way and revealed in a standard way other than for a few publishers like plus for example so um so we're not so we're we're making do in the meantime there's not a way for you to upload um corresponding author information mostly because most people don't have it um one thing we are looking at um is having a waiting to sort of say yes my institution tends to be more of a paying institution or my my institution tends to be less of a paying institution sort of see that way you can at least do some risk balancing around it or for example we can look in in plus in plus is your institution disproportionately the corresponding author or not so i think that gives you a bit of insight into where we might how we might refine this um sort of as the next step or two okay great um i sort of flicking through that sort of another question i haven't picked up but i'm just um thinking about is the um pre-provocation articles so if articles aren't available through interlibrary loan is that um how would how would how would access to those articles but i suppose some some of those are made pretty available by the publisher anyway aren't they i think i don't know and i don't know how frequent that is no no i've got some background music and neighbors so if anyone hears some music that's um that's what that is um i think i think i've we've covered most of the questions um either through the in the course of the presentation or um in that really helpful um um q and a session um i you you're offering Heather that if people had questions uh or if i if i've missed them if i haven't expressed them properly or people think about so we share your contact details yeah the recording of of the um of of this presentation i think the point to emphasize again is that is the discussions with jiss um that you're having and some people have spoken about that and about um the how useful they'll find doing something centrally so i suppose my my um point to uk colleagues is and i know that we have a colleague from um from just listening in my my point is that if people feel this would be a useful thing to have then they should contact jiss um and to try and try and promote that um apart from that i think um you know it's all all that's left is for me to for me to thank you again um to say i think that doing a live demo from halfway around the world um is is the definition of bravery in this world at the moment in our world for the moment so thank you for your interest and i that will continue to be so uh because as you say you know the we need to make informed decisions and we need to make them quite quickly um i think one of the questions about the different publishers so i mentioned the fact that the uk is going to negotiate with Elsevier over the next of 18 months but i think people will be looking for other big deals very quickly so you know can they make savings in the next six months so i think there may be some pressure um to look at some of the other publishers as well but that would be for uh the participants to to express that to you um so yeah so thank you very much thank you all for participating for your questions and once again thank you so much Heather for your time and um a fascinating presentation thanks very much everybody bye bye