IIN and most of its partner publishers have decided to take an alternative approach to the formation of a consortium in the Gulf and MENA region. As a result, our partner publishers are offering exceptional prices for their full (or sometimes partial) collections of electronic journals and their back files.
The main features of the consortium are as follows:
• Consortium pricing mainly affects costs of full collections of publishers
• Libraries must maintain their spend level with our. You may decide to maintain your subscription in print format or switch them to electronic format. In the latter case, you can still decide to receive print copies as well.
• Your Library will pay a small extra fee to receive access to not only its subscribed titles, but also the complete collection of a publisher with its back files
• The objective is to enable universities and other institutions to have access to a large collection of electronic journals and their back files in order to rebuild
their library. Usage statistics and reader feedbacks will help universities to expand their subscription by switching to electronic access, while they can still maintain a level of print subscription.
• The extra fee for a complete collection has the following features:o While it reflects size of the collection, it is a small fraction of the real value of the collection. o It is determined with this assumption that no institute will use all titles. Therefore, for example, publishers are fully aware of the fact that an engineering-oriented institute might not require journals in medicine and life sciences, or other fields.o They are generally (but not always) tiered to reflect various user community sizes.
In general, our partner publishers form between 30 to 40 percent of holdings of a typical library. However, this is usually costing 70 to 80 percent of the library budget. Therefore, by using the Open Consortium initiative, libraries can multiply their titles from our partner publishers a few times (usually between 10 to 25) and receive access to long years of back files (between 5 to 150), while their cost may not increase much.
