> “We are trying to best meet the needs of our community despite budget cuts in the last few years, the greediness of commercial publishers, and the weak Canadi

> “We are trying to best meet the needs of our community despite budget cuts in the last few years, the greediness of commercial publishers, and the weak Canadian dollar," Money's short, thus expenses have to be cut somewhere. Very understandable. > UdeM Libraries will renew access to 150 of the 2,266 journals included in this collection. The price we will pay for these individual subscriptions in 2016 is the same we were willing to pay for the entire collection. So... you save literally zero zilch nichts, except you now hold 85% less things. In other words, this whole action is meaningless. Also, > A survey conducted recently with the university community established that only 256 titles (or 11.6%) within the Springer collection are needed for research and teaching at UdeM. That rubs me in a wrong way, you don't know wether you can use a paper for your own research or teaching until you've read it, meaning until your need for it has been satisfied. (edit) Lucky stumbles do happen, and I generally don't like the idea of scaling a scientific library down. Strictly speaking, UdeM's library actually continues to grow, only at 15% of the previous rate, since old issues aren't being thrown out. But we seem fine relying on (economic) growth as an accurate measure of well-being, so why not apply it here? Then remember the non-existant economic advantage (which should be around an 85% payment cut), and the whole thing stops making any sense. Depending on which and how many branches a university has, 256 journals can mean a whole lot or ridiculously little literature about each subject. I don't know UdeM, so I can't judge them. Add the little sentence > Springer’s articles end up being 225% more expensive at UdeM compared to Elsevier’s. and this whole move starts stinking like there's no tomorrow. (edit) That last sentence may be a bit harsh, but I do believe this should not be taken at face value (something's missing). (rewordings)