Consortium Dashboard
Here's how Unsub works for library consortia, including setup and pricing
Last updated
Here's how Unsub works for library consortia, including setup and pricing
Last updated
Unsub was first released in November 2019. It was obviously a much-needed product because in its first year it has been used by hundreds of universities to better understand their subscription data and negotiate with publishers.
If you haven't already, we strongly recommend that you watch the video to understand the Unsub approach.
We've found library consortia are particularly interested in Unsub. Many consortia are using it in negotations right now. Most of those are confidential, but one group -- the State University of New York -- has publicly said that Unsub helped them save millions of dollars per year in their Elsevier deal across their 60 universities (see .
Unsub for Consortia is just like the standard Unsub product -- each of the consortium members has its own dashboard -- but it adds an extra dashboard view that shows all the data for all the consortium members summed together. This extra dashboard view looks almost identical to the dashboard for an individual university, but all the numbers (downloads, citations, authorships) are sums across all the member universities.
If you have a lot of universities and want to group together just a few of them (like just the members with medical schools, or just the very small schools) to understand the sums of just that group, you can also do that.
This top-level-view consortium data helps you understand the cost and fulfillment possibilities of various subscription paths for the consortium as a whole. Specifically, it can help you negotiate hard if you decide to stay with your Big Deal, or it can help you decide which journals you should subscribe to if you decide to save money by leaving your Big Deal.
In terms of pricing, the price for setting up a consortium in Unsub is just the price of each of its members subscribing -- we add the Consortium dashboard in for free. So if you have 10 members, look up the materials budget (converted roughly into US dollars) for each of the 10 members in the table on , and then sum their Unsub Yearly Costs together to get how much it would cost for your whole consortium to subscribe to Unsub, minus a 10% consortium discount. For the consortium customers we've had so far, in some cases the consortium organization pays this whole cost from their own funds and in other cases the consortium passes on the cost to each of its members, we are good either way.
In terms of setup, most consortia ask their consortium members to upload their own COUNTER data to Unsub. In a few cases, the consortium already has all the COUNTER data centralized and they just it to us and we fill it in to the member's Unsub dashboards behind the scenes. COUNTER data is all that is required to get a basic dashboard going, though you can also upload a spreadsheet of detailed PTA (Post-Termination Access) dates to get more accurate forecasts.
Unsub currently supports analysis of journals published by Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, SAGE, and Taylor & Francis. All publishers by mid-2021. The single Unsub fee lets you use the system for all publishers; there is no extra fee per publisher.
We think that Unsub would be very helpful to your members and to you as a consortium! If you are interested, please email us at