Academic library directors should not sign on to the Big Deal or any comprehensive licensing agreements with commercial publishers.

You read that right. Don’t buy the Big Deal.… [T]he Big Deal serves only the Big Publishers. Many other university and college libraries are also investigating their options, recognizing – as we all do – that the push to build an all-electronic collection can’t be undertaken at the risk of: (1) weakening that collection with journals we neither need nor want, and (2) increasing our dependence on publishers who have already shown their determination to monopolize the information marketplace.

from Kenneth Frazier’s The Librarians’ Dilemma: Contemplating the Costs of the “Big Deal”, published in D-Lib Magazine in 2001.