The Charleston Advisor / October 2020
www.charlestonco.com 55
ADVISOR REVIEWS—STANDARD REVIEW
Unsub Date of Review: September 1, 2020
doi:10.5260/chara.22.2.55
Composite Score: HHHH 1/4 Reviewed by: Grant Hardaway Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas
<ghardawa@trinity.edu>
Abstract
Overview
Unsub is a browser-based decision making tool made for an academic library’s journal collection management team. The interactive data dashboard organizes journals by a carefully calculated cost per use number and allows users to visualize the potential savings of journal cancellations. While not comprehensive in its publisher coverage, Unsub effectively streamlines a typically arduous process.
Unsub is a browser-based decision making tool made for an academic library’s journal collection management team. The tool was created by the small non-profit organization Our Research in late 2019. Formerly known as Unpaywall Journals, Unsub was developed as a response to the complex decision making process necessary to assess the value of journal publishers’ Big Deal packages. Unlike Our Research’s open projects, such as Unpaywall and Impactstory Profiles, the Unsub service is solely supported by user subscriptions.
Pricing Unsub uses a yearly subscription model. The product provides a tiered pricing system based on the amount of a library’s materials budget. A yearly subscription ranges from between $500 for libraries with a materials budget between $0 and $500,000 to $3,000 for budgets that are $2,500,000 or more. If a consortium subscribes to Unsub, each institution is provided with a 10% discount on their subscription. At no additional cost, the consortium administrator will be provided with a personalized data dashboard that displays the data for the entire consortium. Our Research does provide the open source code for Unsub through GitHub (<https://github.com/ourresearch/get-unsub>).
Through a data dashboard, Unsub allows users to forecast potential journal cancellation and subscription decisions. COUNTER data is sent to the Unsub team and they create a personalized dashboard based on that data. Institutions may also send in their Backfile data and pricing lists to further personalize the data set. But, the only data that is necessary to create the dashboard is the institution’s COUNTER data. If institutions subscribe at the consortium-level, Unsub also provides a free consortium dashboard that compiles the data from all participating institutions. The goal of Unsub is to simplify the difficult process of evaluating the losses and savings of unsubscribing from a journal. The interactive dashboard organizes journals by a calculated cost per use (CPU)
FIGURE 1 Unsub’s Histogram Dashboard
