Canadian Association of Research Libraries Members Release Journal Subscription Cost Data

University library members of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) have jointly released their 2016-17 expenditure data for journal and database subscriptions licensed through the Canadian Research Knowledge Network consortium.

The CARL Scholarly Communications Roadmap identified the need for more collective action toward greater transparency of licensing information among member institutions. As publicly funded institutions, research libraries recognize that it is in the public's interest that they provide maximum transparency about the costs and license information of the contractual arrangements for information resources and services into which they enter. 

Donna Bourne-Tyson, CARL President, commented, "The sharing of subscription expenditures for CRKN-licensed resources is an important first step towards increasing the transparency of the Canadian scholarly publishing environment."

A dataset and associated summary table have been released detailing expenditure costs of CARL member university libraries for their subscriptions for 2016-17. The data is not comprehensive of all CARL member libraries, and for those included, it is not comprehensive of their licensed subscriptions.

Click to access data set

Important considerations to interpreting the data