Messages from the Dean

This page features messages from the Dean of Libraries, offering visibility into the evolving role of academic research libraries and sharing key decisions that shape the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s library services and resources. Here, you will find occasional updates on strategic initiatives, campus-wide impacts, and reflections on the Libraries’ ongoing work.

 

The Future of Big Publishing Deals

Posted: February 6, 2025

In 2025, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries is beginning a shift in approach to so-called "big deals" with major academic publishers, starting with journals published by Springer. Beginning in January 2025, the UNL Libraries no longer subscribes en masse to Springer journals. Members of the UNL community will begin to notice changes in February 2025, as the University Libraries takes alternative approaches to delivering Springer-published content. Your paths to accessing this content will look a bit different than they have in the past, but the bottom line for the UNL community is that the Libraries will continue to provide and broker access to the information resources needed for your research and scholarship, creative activities, and teaching and learning. We will pay close attention to usage and other data to adapt and refine our approach in the coming months and years...

The UNL Libraries is making this change based on organizational values, including those articulated in our strategic framework, "A Nebraska Model for Public Research Libraries," coupled with changed information landscapes. This change also creates opportunity for the Libraries to redirect our finite spending to other areas of need and impact. In an ideal scenario, we would have engaged the university community intentionally and broadly before arriving at such a decision, but recent contract negotiations demonstrated that we could no longer abide the status quo, and we had limited time to act.

Over the last 10-15 years, under the promise of low cost per title and immediate access to massive volumes of information, the largest corporate academic publishers encouraged and incentivized academic libraries to sign on to agreements that cost millions of dollars for each library over the life of a three-year or five-year contract. While this approach allowed libraries to provide predictable, unprecedented and immediate access to scholarly information at new scales, it left little to no flexibility for libraries to explore new information and data resources outside of these major, bundled packages. Annual budgets were always already pre-allocated in their entirety.

As the authors, journal editors, and peer reviewers of the articles published by these journals, you know well that practically no part of those millions of dollars paid to publishers has ever made its way to you for all your efforts. Meanwhile, in other cases, you have had to pay additional fees beyond the Libraries-supported subscription costs if you desired to publish open access and increase the reach of your research. Further, while this "big deal" approach appeared from some vantage points to create a somewhat more level playing field among research institutions’ access to academic journals, in particular, it also contributed to a homogenization of research libraries—other than for those libraries with major endowments.

These big deals also routinely locked libraries into historic pricing spends, with the added cost of annual inflation that far exceeded the rate of inflation on other goods and services for much of the twenty-first century. This reality meant that a library—including the UNL Libraries—found itself tied to pricing based on the successes or failures of first negotiations many years in the past. As a result, institutions with effectively equivalent numbers of students and faculty could see radically different pricing.

Consider what this approach might look like in other areas of life: Imagine going to a grocery store where the price you pay for staple items is forever based on whether you originally bought the items at a steep discount or at an inflated price, regardless of the actual cost of the item. Not only are you locked into your initial spend, you are also responsible for a rate of inflation determined by the industry and not pegged to objective economic indicators. Now imagine that you see the receipts of the customers just ahead and behind you in line, and you realize that they are paying a far lower price every time they buy the exact same staple items, whether because they happened to have a coupon or found the item on sale when they first purchased it—or simply purchased it at a historically low price point to begin with.

If I faced this scenario in a grocery store and had a path to say “enough is enough” and to create a more equitable system, I would certainly do so, and that is the philosophy I have brought to this decision as Dean of Libraries regarding our big deals with major corporate academic publishers.

In the coming months and years, the University Libraries will bring this and other conversations to the UNL community. We will seek your partnership in determining a forward-looking portfolio of information and data resources, among other investments in academic libraries as core research and learning infrastructure, that supports the remarkable scholarship and teaching happening on this campus, and that prudently stewards the resources entrusted to us.

Going forward the Libraries will:

  • Maintain perpetual access to a decade (or more) of Springer content that we already purchased, including journals, e-books, and protocols.
  • Continue to subscribe to our selected Nature titles and Springer Protocols.
  • Add a rapid delivery service, called Article Galaxy Scholar, that you can use to request articles published in 2025 and onward from Springer publications.
  • Purchase Springer e-books two-three times a year and will take purchase requests.
  • Monitor data to help us make future decisions on subscriptions. Keep up to date on collection decisions and provide feedback.
Headshot photo of Liz Lorang, Dean of University Libraries
Liz Lorang, Dean of University Libraries

Welcome to the University Libraries at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln!

Shortly after becoming dean of the University Libraries in December 2023, I thought to myself, “I have the best job anywhere at a university.” The source of my conviction? The deep-in-my-bones belief that academic libraries are sites of transformational encounters with information. Such transformational encounters with information make it possible to thrive as individuals, communities, and worlds.

Framed in this way, academic libraries have never been more vital—more alive, more crucial—than they are now. Why? Because we live and move within information environments more complex than ever before. Because the greatest issues of our time are, at their core, information challenges. Because we must think deeply about our information obligations to the future, as commitments to those yet to come.

In my own life, academic libraries have been sites of individual transformation through information many times over. As an undergraduate commuter student, I spent hours between classes in my college’s library, where I remember picking up an academic journal for the first time and contemplating entirely new-to-me possibilities. As a graduate student, I found my way to librarians who took me and my questions seriously and who connected me with resources, including people, that forever altered the trajectory of my research and of my professional identity. As a teacher, I observed the transformations in my students as they graduated from being only discerning receivers of information to being creators of information, recognizing their own authority and power in shaping understanding and knowledge. Later, as a librarian, I attended a workshop where I witnessed firsthand how transforming data from historic sources into new sensory formats temporarily rends a veil between dimensions and makes it possible for us to connect more deeply, more intimately, with others’ lives. In my own experience at that workshop, I held onto a wire as sound waves vibrated through, representing the ebbs, flows, and frequencies of historic lives in a special collection. And as a whole person, I have grappled with the devastating realities, both mental and physical, of people I love through the outstanding scientific and creative information available in the University Libraries, transforming my sense of what it means to be.

Academic libraries also enable transformational encounters with information for communities and worlds, those of today and those we dream. Rather than looking to the past or present for these examples, I challenge us to look to the future: Imagine the transformations that become possible if all Nebraskans have ready access to the best information anywhere, to the most inclusive and capacious information, and to the best information experts anywhere—a feat few other states might seriously imagine at this moment in time. Imagine the social and economic impacts of having a population of the most advanced users of high-quality information and data anywhere in the country, across all of Nebraska. Imagine a thriving trust environment, in which our communities and worlds hold spectra of viewpoints and uphold a commitment to the veracity of the information and data that inform those viewpoints, policy, law, and well-being.

This future is one we can create together.

Collectively, we have serious work to do to arrive at such a future. Today’s dominant information ecosystems do not support a thriving planet or worlds. The status quo of locking down the world’s best information in expensive and proprietary systems ensures that people will resort to low-friction systems, those that appear more affordable, more streamlined, more omnipresent, those that offer a smooth path to access but smooth over the unverified, inexpert, fabricated, or purposely distorted information at their core.

These problems are issues not only for human intelligence but for machine intelligence as well. Today’s dominant information ecosystems mean that—by design and default—predictive and generative models often are developed on the information that is readily available rather than on the best-quality information. And even repositories of quality information have major gaps in what they contain, in whose bodies, whose histories, whose languages, whose perspectives, and whose communities are represented. Already high stakes, these gaps grow in potential consequence in predictive and generative models. We all benefit from ensuring that humans and machines have access to the highest quality, most inclusive, and most representative information possible, and we can achieve such a vision while also valuing innovation, intellectual and cultural property, and privacy.

Thriving as individuals, communities, and worlds, living and dying well, requires that we all have transformational encounters with information. Making such encounters possible is the work of academic libraries. This work involves the information itself and also attention to its ecosystems. As information and its systems grow in complexity, so too does the need for people with training to make sense of these ecosystems, from generalist knowledge to deep specialization, and including archivists, librarians, informationists, and data curators such as those here in the UNL Libraries. We must also tend to the environments in which we conduct this work, both physical and virtual, adapting them alongside wider changes so they remain incubators of transformational encounters.

Whether you engage with our collections, our library environments, or our experts—and I hope you will engage with them all—I look forward to seeing where your transformational encounters with information lead you and all of us together.

- Liz
Elizabeth Lorang, Ph.D.
Dean of University Libraries