Journals

Review of subscriptions

Every fall, the UCSF Library reviews its journal subscriptions as part of the renewal process for the upcoming year. The ever rising cost of electronic resource subscriptions, coupled with an historically flat library budget, has necessitated finding annual savings largely through the reduction of journal subscription costs. More information about subscription challenges can be found on our journal costs webpage.

For 2024, we are fortunate to have received a 4% increase to our library collections budget and do not anticipate needing to cut any subscriptions.

In order to stay within our budget without cancelling subscriptions, the Library will be negotiating reduced or flat price increases, limiting ebook purchasing, delaying all new non-essential subscriptions, and leveraging our consortial participation in the California Digital Library (CDL) to maintain and expand resource access at the lowest possible cost.

UCSF affiliates can suggest a scholarly journal.

Criteria for cancellation

Curious how we make our subscriptions decisions? To identify journals for cancellation, we consider several criteria:

1. Online subscriptions that have historically low use (typically less than 100 full text views per year).
2. Subscriptions that do not align with the UC system’s licensing standards (Word doc).
3. Selected titles that have an unusually high cost per use.

Past journal cancellations

View the list of past journal cancellations starting from 2005 (PDF file).