Subscription Review 2024-2025: Home

The University of Washington Libraries is reviewing all journal and database subscriptions with a target of reducing our subscription expenditures by $400,000, or approximately 3% $1,000,000. The review will be conducted during the 2024-2025 academic year, and the results will inform subscription cancellations in FY26.

This review and reduction is necessary due to the persistent inflation in subscription costs, inconsistent funding for inflation over the years, and recent guidance from the President and Provost regarding Financial Risk Mitigation Efforts. Librarians and Libraries staff compiled the following list of proposed subscription cancellations based on usage and impact metrics, cost, value, and availability through other access methods.

We value and encourage your feedback. We invite the UW community to explore the list and identify titles you consider essential to your teaching or research. Please note that submitting a comment does not guarantee that we will be able to keep the subscription. If a journal you need is canceled, we remain committed to continuing to work with you to provide an alternative path to access the resources you need.

The deadline for comments has passed.

Update

As required by the University President and Provost, the UW Libraries prepared a revised FY26 budget reflecting a 5% reduction in core expenditures. The impact to the Libraries collections budget of this planned reduction is a planned reduction of serials expenditures of $600,000. The original planned target to reduce subscriptions by $400,000 to offset expected inflation, combined with the additional budget reduction of $600,000 requires that we increase the target for this subscription review to $1,000,000. 

Update - August 2025

An updated proposed cancellation list is posted below. Some titles were removed from the first proposed list based on feedback. Additional titles are included to try to reach the cancellation target.

In addition to the subscriptions listed below, we are also breaking up our Sage journals package and maintaining a smaller list of subscribed titles from Sage. Information about the Sage journals is on a separate page.

Subscription Cancellations: Final Update 9/19/2025 

Thank you to the UW community who took the time to provide feedback on the initial list of proposed cancellations posted in April. Over the summer, subject librarians and Libraries collections staff reviewed the feedback and eliminated many of the titles on the initial list from consideration for cancellation. 

However, the 5% budget reduction in core expenditures required us to expand our target and make additional cancellation decisions. The subject librarians carefully reviewed the lists of subscriptions in their subject areas and identified additional titles to cancel. In August we made the difficult decision to break up our journal package from Sage. The final list of titles selected for cancellation is below. Sage package titles being kept and canceled is on the Sage Cancellations tab.

Despite these efforts to identify additional titles and break up the Sage journals package, we did not reach the increased target of $1,000,000. Altogether the cancellations we identified total approximately $750,000. 

Our planning for the coming fiscal years anticipates the need for subscription reviews every year to adjust for inflation in subscription costs. For FY27 we will need to add the remaining $250,000 shortfall in the cancellation target from FY26 to the subscription review planning for FY27. We will provide updates later in the year on the planning for the next subscription review. 

While we will be losing direct subscription access to these journals, we offer several alternative article access options. For many years our Interlibrary loan service provided quick delivery of articles on request. More recently we’ve implemented new 24/7 services to deliver requested articles rapidly, sometimes in just a few minutes, and to make it easier to find open access copies of articles and connect you to our subscribed journals wherever you are on the web. 

We greatly appreciate your time and attention in helping us with this difficult process this year. If you are interested in knowing how you can support the Libraries during these challenging times, one way is to consider donating to the Library Excellence Fund. This fiscal year, the Libraries will utilize $100,000 in donated funds to increase support for open access and to purchase electronic resources.