Assessment of the Use of Big Deals Suscription in Spain in the transition to Open Access

Abstract

The paper analyzes the evolution of the use of electronic scientific journals in the period between 2007 and 2018 by the academic communities of the public universities of Castille and Leon attached to the BUCLE Consortium (Spain). The time period of the study has been limited to allow the analysisfrom the moment of the consolidation of the use of journals in electronic format by the academic community, up to the paradigm shift stage that advocates open access to scientific contents. To achieve the aforementioned objective, downloads of articles from scientific journals distributed in the universities of Burgos, León, Salamanca and Valladolid are analyzed by four broad-spectrum providers: Emerald, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and Wiley. Based on the results of this study, and taking into account its limitations regarding the number of universities analyzed and the number of distributors included, we estimate that the time of big deals, with their strengths and weaknesses, has not yet finished.