Starting in January 2026, we’ll be adding an on-demand option, Article Galaxy, for providing PDFs as well as a new linking technology, LibKey, that provides articles faster and more efficiently. 

What’s Changing? For many years, academic libraries, including Colby, have relied heavily on journal licensing agreements, known as “Big Deal” packages, which allowed us to have the ability to offer users a robust journal collection, only by participating in bulk buying from major publishers. While these bundles offer broad access, their escalating costs are financially unsustainable and increasingly misaligned with the specific research needs of our faculty and students.

To address this, Colby Libraries is transitioning in January from our “Big Deal” agreements with Elsevier and Springer, to a more targeted and demand-driven model. We will subscribe to the most utilized journals from these packages, while still guaranteeing rapid and seamless access to all other journal content from these two publishers.

How will this work? We are setting up Article Galaxy to provide on-demand access to the entire Elsevier and Springer corpus, without limits or caps, to all Colby faculty, students, and staff. At the same time, we’re rolling out an improved library linking tool, LibKey, which provides more intuitive and easy access to article PDFs, whether they’re subscription content, open access, or available through Article Galaxy. This functionality will exist in library databases and discovery tools, including Google Scholar, and this service is fully compliant with copyright. 

To learn more about these tools, check out our Article Galaxy Scholar and LibKey library guides.