Whether it’s their relationships with suppliers, users, or their own institutions HE libraries are treading a fine line between crisis and opportunity says Ann Rossiter, Executive Director of SCONUL.

UNIVERSITY budget cuts – driven by years of frozen tuition fees, cuts to international student numbers and increases in National Insurance – have led to jobs, courses and whole departments disappearing.

The HE Library sector is still assessing its position. Ann Rossiter says when SCONUL surveyed its members in January it discovered that HE libraries expect to spend £51m less in 2025 than in 2024 – a cut of about nine per cent.

But that picture is changing: “Given what we know from other sources our figures might be an underestimate. A more recent Universities UK (UUK) survey of 60 institutions suggests that cuts are deeper.”

And UUK also suggests financial pressures are increasing. “So, we’re not at the end of it,” Ann says, “and of course that’s going to have an impact on library teams and what’s required from the library for the institution.”

Visibility

“I’m very aware that the readers of this interview are going to be incredibly anxious. It’s a very stressful time.”

However, she said: “Libraries are being incredibly actively lobbied for. SCONUL is supporting its members to be as effective as possible in doing that.”

Some of this is intensified lobbying along traditional lines like highlighting library value to institutions, their role in achieving good NSS scores and their support for research, teaching and learning.

But disruption from the funding crisis has opened up new avenues for advocacy. “Because libraries are good at creating frictionless services, nobody looks inside,” Ann said, “they’re black boxes. So, if there is an upside to what’s happening now, it’s that people are having hypothetical conversations about what libraries will no longer be able to do – that if we reduce the budget by X, then we won’t get Y.

“It’s the proverb that in every crisis there’s an opportunity. We get the opportunity to talk to academics and university leaders about the implications of not funding libraries properly. It means telling academics ‘you won’t get your stuff anymore’ and academics go ‘Hang on, does that really mean I can’t get my favourite journal anymore?’.”

Sky fall?

The funding crisis adds a new dimension to another old problem: big deals with big publishers. “In the long-term the sector’s relationship with publishers is still one of its biggest issues.

"But this year there are other hugely important demands on people’s time and attention. If your institution is asking you to make 10 per cent cuts, then that is a very pressing issue.

"And given that three quarters, approximately, of the sector has had to do that in the last year, then that is going to be high up on the list of things to worry about.”

But rather than diverting attention away from publisher deals it is creating pressure. Not only is there not enough money to continue paying publishers what they demand, but three institutions have now gone public about not extending their big deals with Elsevier.

In December 2024 Sheffield, Surrey and York were the only institutions not to renew contracts with Elsevier. They are now being watched closely by the sector and Ann says: “So far, for them, it is working. And I think there are early indications that, in fact, the sky hasn’t fallen in.”

When SCONUL published its member survey a month later, it showed that 60 per cent of HE libraries are also contemplating ditching the big deals.

Librarians have threatened to walk away from these deals in the past, but didn’t. Now that they have, will publishers listen?

Negotiations

Jisc is now in the process of negotiating new agreements with the five big publishers. Ann said: “What Jisc has done on our behalf, with our agreement and consent, is to make some very big asks of the publishers including changing their business models and cutting their costs.

"One of the key issues is the ‘big deal’ inflation – the constant adding of things that are not wanted. The framework that Jisc has put in place, this ethical publishing framework, is very demanding of publishers. I expect some will step forward to meet as many of those requests as they can, but others won’t.”

Ann points out that paradoxically, there is additional strength in the libraries' arguments going into negotiations because of the desperate financial situation: “It is worth bearing in mind that three quarters of our members are restructuring this year and there is only so much bandwidth for radical change. But then there is also only so much money, the spending envelope is definitely smaller. Universities are in flux, massively. You’ve got academics as well as librarians losing jobs, merging departments, departments being closed, people feeling at risk.

"In my experience, when people feel under threat, they find taking risks less straightforward. So there are push and pull factors here. What we do is talk to our members about are the possible models for them –the opportunities and the drawbacks. That conversation is very, very live for everyone.”

Opting out of these deals isn’t straight-forward politically, practically, or even financially because, Ann says: “It doesn’t mean that everything you’ve spent with, let’s say Elsevier, is saved. You still have to fund the alternative forms of provision. And then what does this look like three years down the road – that’s a really important part of the picture.”

Publisher confidence

One story is that publishers don’t need to worry about HE dissatisfaction. Publishers have made Open Access models as profitable as subscription models and they tell their investors that academia’s publish or perish culture drives the investment story.

“Inherent in that description is a sense in which publishers are a neutral partner responding to the needs of the sector,” Ann says. “I would beg to differ. There is a financial incentive to this expansion in publishing output. Shareholders want to see this growth and I don’t think the driver is demand from academia.

"The growth comes through increasing the number of journals which are bundled into the big deals and which institutions pay for with the year-on-year big deal inflation. So one of the things that we have asked for in the negotiations is smaller deals without that long tail of journals that don’t provide much value to the institution. We want to see those go.”

Tipping point?

“Libraries have been very clear for a long time about the lack of ethics in the academic publishing models and conversations with academics about how to change this without causing problems for them is continuously ramping up. It’s also an international conversation, not just in the UK. When it comes down to it, that conversation is only part of the way through.

“There is still a job to be done but I don’t think if it’s convincing academics that the model is wrong. I think they know that. I think the job is now to convince them there’s an alternative.

“And there are so many disruptive factors in HE at the moment. The financial crisis is only one of them. AI is another. Alongside this we have an academic publisher community that is attached to old fashioned business models. Together these factors offer scope for doing things very differently.

"I think in the next five years things will look very radically different.”

AI

“We’ve got AI tools being developed but it is challenging to evaluate whether these are value for money, what they do, or even whether you want them switched on or not.”

These problems are not a surprise according to Ann, who says: “SCONUL strategy in relation to AI right from the beginning was to say we’re very unlikely, in the community size that we have, to be building our own AI tools. So a lot of the AI tools that have been developed are student support or researcher support tools, but there are very few library, workflow type tools which add substantive value.

“There are exceptions like a start-up which surfaces open educational resources, rather than paid for content, in academics’ reading lists. It’s work that probably wouldn’t have been done before because it was too labour intensive. And it’s an example of AI becoming exciting for libraries because it allows us to work differently and it’s got real potential to save institutions money.”

Publisher AI

“There are challenges with some of the AI tools being developed,” Ann says. “If each publisher sells AI based research support tools trained on their own content alone, this throws up a range of problems. First, libraries would come under pressure to a purchase a whole range of different AI tools and not every institution will be able to afford this, exacerbating inequalities in the sector.

"This isn’t great for research purposes either. For example, a chemist will get one set of outputs to their prompts for one publisher. But the same questions will get a different set of responses from another publisher. There’s a lack of universality in responses. But I think in five years’ time this is going to look really different. Publishers will have to change their business models in an AI environment.”

CILIP and SCONUL

All this change will mean disruption in the profession which, Ann says, leaves “a huge amount of scope for a CILIP and SCONUL to work together”.

Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) as well as the Green and sustainable agendas, are areas where she thinks there will always be potential for joint working. But the other obvious area of alignment is “how the profession will develop as the world changes”.

One of these changes is workforce size “I think the Library Workforce is going to shrink,” Ann says. “I can’t see that that won’t be the case.”

At the moment this is mainly via voluntary redundancy which, Ann points out, is still cuts. She said SCONUL is looking at “how you cut with the least damage. If the shape of your team is driven by voluntary severance you have to think creatively about how to make best use of the people who are left. But it’s no longer a question of doing more with less, it’s a question of doing less with less and how you titrate that. We’re planning to do some work on it when the dust has settled a little bit. And on how people approach the restructuring of their teams.”

But she sees SCONUL and CILIP working together in this difficult environment to keep the profession coherent. “There’s a broadening out and a blurring of boundaries in the profession. How do we support development so that the prompt engineer is a librarian and the frontline customer services person is also a librarian?"

"And how do we do that while keeping our cultural, and ethical missions –missions shared by everyone I’ve ever worked with in Libraries? And do that in a post truth era – I don’t want to call it that – but where truth becomes a contested thing. In the space we’re in commitment to honesty and integrity is absolutely important.”