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.

Fiscal year 2025-2026 budget

The collections budget, which funds journal subscriptions, books, and databases, has been reduced by 15%, with additional pressure from rising costs associated with institutional growth and expansion.

This fiscal year, we are mitigating the impact through:

• one-time funding support from UCSF Health
• negotiated reduced or flat price increases where possible
• canceling low-use and high-cost resources
• delaying non-essential subscriptions
• limiting ebook purchases
• leveraging UC-wide partnerships through the California Digital Library (CDL)
• participating in a UC-wide exercise to identify consortial subscriptions for future cancellation

These strategies allow us to mostly balance the 2026 collections budget and avoid deeper cuts in the immediate term. However, it is important to note that the one-time funding sources will be depleted and, unless new permanent funding is secured, the Library anticipates even more severe budget constraints in fiscal year 2026-2027.

Proposed resource cancellations for 2026

After extensive evaluation and assessment, we have identified our lowest used journals, non-essential databases, and resources with inconsistent usage to further meet our 2026 budget constraints.

View the list of proposed journal and database cancellations for 2026. Please contact Sarah McClung, head of collection development, with any questions or concerns by Friday, October 17, 2025. You must log in to UCSF Box with MyAccess to view the list of titles.

Interlibrary Loan (ILL) services remain available for journal articles or book chapters if the Library does not have direct full text access to a needed resource.

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 200 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.
4. Selected titles with unusually low Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

Past journal cancellations

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