Journals Expenditure

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Dear Swansea University,

1. How much (money) did LIS spend on electronic academic journal subscriptions as a total for each of the last five years.

2. If available and easily broken up, please could you break this spending down into departments/colleges for the last two years.

Yours faithfully,

D Ingham

WILLIAMS R.C., Swansea University

1 Attachment

Dear Mr. Ingham,

Thank you for your request for information set out below. Your request has been considered under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. The response of Swansea University is as follows:

Question 1)

Caveat: It is almost impossible to split costs between every single electronic & print subscription due to the nature of a number of the agreements which include both versions on a single invoice payment. The figures below represent *overall* serials expenditure as incurred via the Library procurement process (i.e. not individual subscriptions held by academic staff) and in many cases will also include VAT & postage where applicable.

Total Serials expenditure:
2007/8 : £1,514,890.88
2008/9 : £1,674,674.95
2009/10 : £1,721,315.12
2010/11 : £1,761,903.75
2011/12 : £1,861,823.92

Question 2)

Please see attachment.

Breakdown by Financial Year & Subject Fund (not exact, but nearest system definable equivalent to departmental breakdown) in the attached spreadsheet – please note due to various College & Department reorganisations, library fund deletions or mergers & some renaming limitations imposed by our Management System, there are some changes to designations from year to year – thus a fund name may not represent exactly the same subjects or subscriptions from year to year. Continuity of what coverage area is implied by subject fund names should thus not be inferred in every case.

A further caveat is around patterns of expenditure: due to the coverage of the larger ‘big deal’ bundled packages often containing hundreds of titles from suppliers such as Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell or Springer (where costs are contributed to by each subject area, but a large, single invoice paid from a single central Library fund) some subjects maintain fewer independent subscriptions – and thus the subject fund figure may be highly un-representative of the amount of subscription titles the subject has access to. Two good examples of this would be Physics or Medicine, where the bulk of applicable titles fall under the “Multi Disciplinary Bundle Packages” fund name, rather than the ‘Physics’ or ‘Medicine’ funds.

The way funds are structured here & complexities of bundled journal packages against individual subscriptions mean that question 2 is a bit difficult to answer meaningfully, but explanatory notes are given with the data in the spreadsheet I have provided (shown in blue above)

I trust this information is of assistance to you but please contact me if you have any questions in the matter.

Yours sincerely

Rowland Williams
University Records Manager / Rheolwr Cofnodion y Brifysgol
Vice-Chancellor's Office / Swyddfa'r Is-Ganghellor
Swansea University / Prifysgol Abertawe
Singleton Park / Parc Singleton
Swansea / Abertawe
SA2 8PP

Swansea University is a registered charity. No. 1138342.
Mae Prifysgol Abertawe yn elusen gofrestredig. Rhif. 1138342.

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