Journal Collections
There is an increasing tendency for publishers to make their journals available as part of large collections as well as individually. The Library subscribes to a number of collections from major publishers and in this way is able to make available hundreds of additional titles for very little more than the cost of the original individual titles. An example of this is the Wiley collection. For the cost of its original 29 titles (US$31,000), it is now possible to access the full content of over 300 titles published by Wiley.
The downside of such collections is that access to all titles is only possible as long as the Library maintains the amount of money committed at the original level – plus an annual increase, typically of 6-10 percent. This means in practice that if any one title in a collection is cancelled, access will be lost to the collection as a whole and only the small number of original titles will then be available, at their current individual pricing. Collections in this category include Wiley, Kluwer, Springer, Oxford University Press, Academic Press and Blackwell Synergy. All of these collections are multidisciplinary in content and are likely to be used as resources for both teaching and research.
There is also a number of titles that can only be purchased as a complete collection. The best known of these are Emerald management xtra and PsycArticles (APA - the American Psychological Association). Memberships such as that of the Association for Computing machinery (ACM) are similar.
The publisher Elsevier also has a collection known as ScienceDirect. This differs
from the collections mentioned above in that it is possible to cancel individual
titles as long as the total 'spend' is not reduced. This means you can replace
Elsevier titles with other Elsevier titles of equivalent cost. Our subscription
to ScienceDirect also contains subject subsets in Business, Decision Sciences
and Social Sciences. These can only be cancelled as complete collections. Continued
access to these collections is also dependent upon the Library maintaining the
overall level of funds committed to Elsevier.