single articles from commercial document suppliers instead of subscribing to whole journals. Additionally, academic and research libraries cancel subscriptions to the least used or least cost-effective journals. Another tactic has been converting from printed to electronic copies of journals; however, publishers sometimes charge more for the online edition of a journal, and price increases for online journals have followed the same inflationary pattern as have journals in paper format. Many individual libraries have joined co-operative consortia that negotiate license terms for journal subscriptions on behalf of their member institutions. Another tactic has been to encourage various methods of obtaining free access to journals, of which black open access provided by Sci-Hub became the most successful. Big deal A subscription to a bundle of several journals, at a discounted price, is known as a "big deal". It became prevalent in the 2000s as the amount of content offered by the Big Five grew beyond the perceived ability to pick specific titles to subscribe to. In a big deal, a library or consortium of libraries typically pays several million dollars per year to subscribe to hundreds or thousands of toll access journals. By offering such discounted bundled subscriptions, the Big Five were able to squeeze out of the market smaller (often, non-profit and less expensive) publishers, who did not have many journal titles and could not offer a discounted bundle subscription. In the 2010s, efforts increased to "unwrap" or "unbundle" the subscription, if not to cancel them altogether. Some "libraries are electing to critically appraise these big deals by assessing their collections, the value for money they are receiving from these packages, and how they might more strategically spend their finite collections resources." Services emerged for libraries to share information and reduce the information asymmetry in negotiations with the publishers, like the SPARC cancellation tracking and the Unpaywall Journals data analysis tool. Open access Developed in part as a response to the serials crisis, open access models have included new models of financing scholarly journals that may serve to reduce the monopoly power of scholarly journal publishers which is considered a contributing factor to the creation of the serials crisis. These include open access journals and open access repositories. See also Academic journal publishing reform List of public domain resources behind a paywall Library and information science Elsevier § Criticism and controversies The Cost of Knowledge United States v. Swartz References Further