How much is your university paying for journal access?

" ... Then came 1996 and Academic Press (AP) introduced what would become known as the “Big Deal” – online subscriptions to large bundles of electronic journals sold at a fixed fee for an arranged period of time (typically three years). Much like home cable subscriptions that include hundreds of TV stations, the Big Deal came with an all-you-can-eat offer for universities and libraries – and they all gobbled it up whole! At first glance, the system, which was soon adopted by all the other big publishing houses, was a breath of fresh air and came as a solution to a desperate problem ... libraries soon learned that there are many downsides to consuming academia in a bundle. Most libraries would spend a great deal of their budgets on the Big Deal, then would find themselves lacking funds for other important purchases like buying monographs, which had an impact on scientists and other researchers alike, a situation exacerbated by the fact that the proportion of research university funding allocated to libraries has been falling over time ... But it would be wrong to portray the Big Deal as a cunning plan by publishers to entrap librarians, as some conspiracies might have us believe. So, libraries should hold no ill grudge for this, but they have other reasons to be unhappy. One being that journal charge preferentially for their subscriptions, as revealed by an investigative paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s not that universities and libraries pay a different price for the same bundle – this is something we all knew somehow – it’s the crazy inequality of it all ... Universities negotiate with academic publishing companies behind closed doors, and those deals usually come with nondisclosure agreements that keep the bundled prices secret. The authors of the study got ahold of “big deal” contracts with publishers (non-profit and for-profit alike) from 55 public university libraries and 12 consortia via FOIA (Freedom of Information ACT) requests or just plain asking nicely ... Take the case of University of Oregon and Oklahoma State University – both are similar in size and numbers of PhDs graduated each year, yet OK State paid $185,795 for the Wiley journal package and the University of Oregon paid $285,036. There are many other cases you can find in the full paper, and what this goes to show is that pricing is not made over some objective metrics, but rather by bargaining. University of Michigan paid almost twice as much as the University of Wisconsin for the same Elsevier package. Not coincidentally, UM’s acquisitions budget is almost double the size of UW ..."