Unsub Surfacing Soon at MSU
For several years the Missouri State University Libraries has offered an internal grant competition to its current full-time employees to fund innovative ideas, projects, content, and services. Recently Lindsey Taggart submitted an innovation grant to subscribe to Unsub. The Dean and Associate Dean reviewed the application and funded it in the amount of $2,500.
Unsub is a data dashboard that helps academic libraries divest from Big Deal journal subscriptions. Unsub allows users to create forecasting scenarios based on subscriptions and cost per use, including calculations to account for ILL costs, university authorship, and OpenAccess/backfile access. Unsub also offers a data tool to estimate spend on article processing charges. Currently, the APC tool covers five major journal publishers (including Elsevier and Wiley) but plans to expand this summer.
Access to the Unsub dashboard is subscription based and has over 300 current subscribers including Duke, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins. The source code itself is open source, but this subscription model funds operations and staff of the service (Unsub is a nonprofit organization).
MSU’s subscription to Unsub is aligned with a major goal of our current five-year plan to make the MSU Libraries as an organization more data-informed. Thanks, Lindsey, for submitting this innovation grant.