More about this recommendation

There are 2 primary reasons it is a bad idea to cut big deals by only a little, thereby saving only a small percentage of your spend with that publisher.

1. With most publishers, dropping a big deal and moving to direct subscriptions increases your inflation rate by about 2%. So, if you cut 1% from a big deal and spent the remainder on subscriptions, then the very next year you’d be paying MORE for a handful of subscriptions than you’d be paying for the whole big deal! If you cut 10% from a big deal, then in 5 years, you’d be back up to the cost of the big deal, and with many fewer titles to show for it.
2. For most schools, dropping any big deal means a huge drop in subscribed title count and in your total usage of journals from that publisher. It just isn’t worth doing that if you aren’t saving much money. If big deals are always going to result in huge losses when you drop them, you might as well save a lot of money in the process.

We recommend not dropping a big deal unless you plan to spend less than 50% of the big deal cost on individual subscriptions. Even with that approach, your total cost post-big deal will still be higher than 50% of the big deal cost because of increased inflation, staffing, and ILL costs associated with the individual subscription model.