The University of Missouri E-Resources Cooperative Office (UMECO) serves the libraries of all four University of Missouri System Campuses by providing cost savings and efficiencies through collaboration.
System Shared E-Resources
UMECO manages a fund to purchase e-resources for system-wide use. The fund is created from contributions from each of the campus library budgets.
Campus E-Resources
In addition, UMECO manages individual renewals and additions for the campus libraries. Agreements may include multiple institutions or a single institution.
Affiliate E-Resources
UMECO also manages individual renewals, additions, and cancellations for affiliate libraries. Affiliate libraries are other Academic libraries across the state.
Cost savings
UMECO helps schools contain costs. From its system-level vantage point, UMECO is able to find the best possible prices and identify savings based on system-wide spends with vendors, participation of multiple campuses, consortia memberships, and other factors. While University budgets are shrinking nationwide, the cost of e-resources generally increases each year, often by as much as 6%.
Collaboration
UMECO works on collection development and evaluation projects with teams across the System libraries to reduce duplication of effort while strengthening local academic engagement.
Staff Sharing
The efforts of UMECO staff minimize the need and associated cost of labor on the individual campuses.
The UM System Libraries will spend $1,105,453.70 of shared funding to subscribe to 6 systemwide e-resources. The remaining shared funding will be distributed to the campuses for local electronic resources acquisitions. The amount that is set aside for System Libraries is static. Therefore, as costs increase, the amount that goes back to each campus annually, decreases annually.
UM Libraries spent $1,039,292.94 of shared funding to subscribe to 6 systemwide electronic resources. Campuses divided remaining funding to use on local e-resources collections decisions.
New Funding and Selection Model
After several years of cancellations, the systemwide collection reached a point where it was no longer equitably serving all four campuses. Each campus has its own areas of specialty and priority. Although the remaining resources were all of high use and value. Some were valued by certain campuses more than others. After careful analysis, the four campuses identified six resources of highest priority and importance across the board. The cost savings of the systemwide agreements for these six resources are safeguarded by pooled funding. The rest of the funding that would be available for systemwide e-resources was re-distributed to campus libraries for local collections decisions. UMECO moved to more traditional consortia model, where members are able to choose the agreements that they participate in a la carte.
The UM System Libraries spent $2,125,558.10 to subscribe to 36 systemwide electronic resources.
IBM Journals was historically on the shared systemwide list but ceased publication.
The UM System Libraries spent $2,179,369.82 of a shared fund to subscribe to 37 systemwide electronic resources. The UM System Libraries removed 9 resources from the systemwide collections. Campuses decided whether they wanted to pick these resources up locally.
"Breaking the Big Deals"
Elsevier - Cost savings were achieved on the Elsevier ScienceDirect agreement at the expense of canceling the Freedom Collection, roughly 1,900 titles curated by Elsevier. Analysis showed that only 3% of the titles were consistently used 100 time or more per year at all campuses. Instead of subscribing to the full Freedom Collection package, each campus worked with Elsevier to create their own custom lists of high-usage or high-value titles. (ScienceDIrect is not on the shared budget.)
Wiley - The four libraries previously subscribed to a package of Wiley journal titles through the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA). In FY21, only Missouri University of Science and Technology retained this package. The other three campuses negotiated custom packages of titles selected by their campuses.
Open Access Agreement
Company of Biologists - MU and UMKC signed Read and Publish Agreements with Company of Biologists for FY21. The agreement provides unlimited access to Development, Journal of Cell Science, and Journal of Experimental Biology including perpetual access to content dating back to 1853. It also provides uncapped fee-free Open Access publishing of research articles for corresponding authors, with authors retaining copyright. When authors have a paper accepted, they are be sent a link to identify how they want the paper to be published. This link takes them back to the CCC website where they can choses OA or not. If they choose OA under the R&P agreement then chosen institutional portal users are sent an email to verify that the author is correctly attributing the article to the agreement and to validate the affiliation of the author to their institution. Once this is confirmed the APC will be discounted by 100%, and no payment required. There was no difference in price from the standard agreement.
The UM System Libraries spent $2,274,503 of a shared fund to purchase 43 systemwide electronic resources.
