How to Configure Cost-optimal Procurement Consortia for Academic Libraries

The academic sector has been faced with strong monopolization tendencies occurring in the academic publisher market in recent years. A countermeasure from the demand-side has been the formation of procurement consortia by academic libraries which are intended to reduce costs and simultaneously optimizing the availability of academic journals in order to sufficiently serve their customers (i.e. faculty and students). The objective of this paper is to determine cost-minimal structures for library consortia. We develop a non-linear and binary optimization model which is solved by applying a genetic algorithm (GA). The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the GA by applying it to a real-world problem in the German academic e-journals market. The results show that the found solution results in costs that are approximately 30 % lower than the current regional-based solution.