Unsub is a dashboard that helps you reevaluate your big deal’s value and understand your cancellation options.

For the last few years we’ve supported a small set of very large publishers.

One of the most requested features has been support for more publishers.

As of today – right now – we support all publishers.

We heard you, and we’re super excited to get this in your hands. Here’s some important details:

• All publishers are supported. We no longer support specific publishers, but rather we support any publisher.
• A mix of publishers is supported. This was another oft requested feature, mostly related to aggregators, and actually naturally arose out of our change to support all publishers. Unsub dashboards no longer have logic filtering what titles are in your dashboard by publisher – so it’s just as easy for a dashboard to have titles from one publisher or 20 publishers.
• Title prices are now required. Supporting all publishers, it’s not feasible for us to collect and update titles prices for all of their titles. For existing Unsub packages created before today, we’ve incorporated the public prices we had (for the big 5 we supported: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE) into your packages. For new packages moving forward, you’ll have to upload your own title prices. We’ve updated the documentation accordingly.
• APC report has moved from package to institution level. We have APC data for the big 5 publishers, but now that we’re moving to any publisher, we can no longer provide publisher specific APC reports. However, you can now get an APC report for your institution that includes an estimate of your APC spend for the big 5 publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE). See the APC Report documentation page for more.

But, we didn’t stop there. Here’s some additional features you can use today that we think you’ll enjoy:

• Packages now have Descriptions. When you login to Unsub you’ll see evidence of this change straight away. You can use this package attribute to include a lot of detail about your package to remind your future self and others of important details about your package. See the docs for more information.
• Package views now have an Edit Details tab. In this tab you can change the package name and description. See the docs for more information.
• Packages have an optional filter setup step. This could be used for a variety of use cases, but first and foremost can be used to get back to the state of your package before today’s changes. That is, we no longer filter by publisher. If you had a Wiley package before today you should have only seen titles published by Wiley in your dashboard. However, moving forward, we do not filter by publisher, so that same Wiley package may include some titles from other publishers that were in your COUNTER reports. You can use this new feature to limit the set of titles that appear in your dashboard. See the Upload journal filter documentation page to learn more.

Notes:

• During testing, we heard that aggregators may not provide a COUNTER 5 TR_J2 file. As we require a TR_J2 file if you choose COUNTER 5 in Unsub, we provide a fake TR_J2 file. Let us know if you run into any issues with this! See the docs page for more info.
• As we support more publishers, we’ll run into more edge cases. We’ve heard that some publishers only provide a COUNTER 5 TR_J1 file – and do not provide TR_J2, TR_J3, and TR_J4 files. We don’t currently support the COUNTER 5 TR_J1 file. Get in touch if this is something you need.
• There may be “growing pains” moving from support for 5 publishers to all publishers. For example, journal metadata that’s crucial to Unsub may not be complete for some journals. Please do get in touch if you run into any issues. We’ll be keeping an eye on things and will

If you are not a current Unsub subscriber and you’re interested to learn more schedule a demo or go ahead and purchase.

If you are a current Unsub subscriber, log in, kick the tires, and let us know what you think.

To learn more about all the new features head over to our documentation.

In an upcoming webinar (date to be announced soon) I’ll dive into all the new features and answer any questions.

We’re starting an Unsub (https://unsub.org/) webinar series next week!

Why would you want to attend? These webinars should help you get better value from Unsub regardless of whether you want to just understand your options, get a better deal on your big deal, or cancel your big deal. 

Every two weeks we’ll cover a new topic, with two time slots for each topic to serve a wider array of time zones: morning and afternoon PST (Pacific Standard) time.

If our webinar times don’t work for you, we are planning to record webinars and upload them for anyone to watch on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/unsub).

Here are the first three topics we’ll cover:

• Feb 8 & 10: Unsub demo – an overview of the product
• Feb 22 & 24: Eric Schares demoing Unsub Extender
• Mar 8 & 10: Deep dive on Unsub scenarios

Other topics are in the works – we’ll announce them soon. Let us know here, elsewhere, or email me (scott@ourresearch.org) if there’s any topics you’d like covered in our webinar series.

The webinar series is free. However, we will require registration so we know how many people are coming and to make it easier for you to remember to attend (i.e., Zoom email confirmation, add to your calendar, etc). 

Our first webinar is titled Unsub Demo – An Overview of the Product – Feb 8 and 10:

• Date: Tuesday, February 8, 2022
• Time: 8:30 – 9:30 am PST (Time converter tool)
• Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIvduqvrT0iGtwrPdj0PQiTBcFhPEK7SQzx 

• Date: Thursday, February 10, 2022
• Time: 3:30 – 4:30 pm PST (Time converter tool)
• Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYocOmsqTkqGtyljdyLuTzm9vGCd-lhFn81

We’ll put out registration links soon for subsequent webinar topics.

Why OurResearch?

I’m thrilled to have landed a job with OurResearch working full-time on Unsub. When I was looking for a job this summer I wanted a new experience; I wanted to be challenged and to learn new skills – Unsub was the perfect match. With respect to coding, I moved from 100% R programming to 100% Python. In addition, the domain (tools for librarians) is very different from my previous job (open source software for researchers) – just the big change I wanted. 

Academic Libraries

Despite coming into this job without experience working as a librarian, I’ve always deeply appreciated libraries and the work librarians do. During my time in academia (bachelors through post-doc) I benefited a lot from various university libraries (Rice University and Simon Fraser University, to name a few), and experienced the technological change from print to electronic as ILL requests first came in hardbound and printed form, then transitioned to electronic forms. I’m excited to be able to help librarians after benefiting from their work for so many years.

What I’ll work on

As the Unsub product owner I’ll make decisions about features, implement those features, fix bugs, do demos for librarians, and of course do lots of support. I’m excited to make Unsub the best tool for librarians to reevaluate big deals and understand their cancellation options. 

Challenges and opportunities

The biggest challenge I see in maintaining Unsub is making sure our forecasts are as accurate as possible. I’ve learned already that it can be difficult to keep track of what publishers are doing with respect to big deals, title by title prices, etc. 

There’s a big, neh huge, opportunity here to push scholarly literature much further towards open access – while at the same time freeing up library budgets to support more collaborative players in the scholarly publishing community.