How the university ranking system works
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A university’s reputation is determined by the academics who work there, the research produced by the university, the facilities offered to both staff and students, along with many other factors. Quality of library facilities play an essential part in maintaining the status and reputation of a university, so having reduced or limited access to the most recent articles is extremely damaging to a university’s ranking and therefore its attractiveness to students.On the other hand, we have academics whose reputation is built on their ability to communicate something new to the world. Nowadays, the focus has shifted from quality to quantity, and universities find themselves managing targets composed of academic journal impact factors, university rankings and scores in the government’s research excellence framework.
In 2015, the University of Montreal decided to take a practical approach to its subscription negotiations. They carefully examined their collection of approximately 50,000 journals to see which titles were essential for their faculty and students. The analysis, which combined usage and citation statistics with faculty surveys, revealed that only around 11.6% to 36.9% of the titles in their big-deal bundles were indispensable.
With the ever-increasing costs of deals with the major academic publishing houses, universities from all around the world are resorting to ‘trimming the fat’ — canceling deals which are viewed to be less critical for their staff and students. Over the last few years, around two dozen libraries in the U.S. and Canada have canceled at least one big deal with a publisher.