ALIA Forum on Purchasing Agreements and Licensing
2 February 2004
The Forum was organised by the ALIA Purchasing and Consortia Reference Group, and was held in Melbourne on Monday 2 February 2004 immediately prior to the VALA 2004 conference. It was held at the premises of the law firm, Blake, Dawson and Waldron, located overlooking the Yarra River and the suburbs west, south and east of the Melbourne CBD.
The aim of the Forum was to bring together purchasers and suppliers to discuss the issues of concern to customers and suppliers in the acquisition of online resources.
Keynote address, Eve Woodberry, CAUL/CEIRC
National Information Infrastructure Issues for Research and Higher Education
Eve outlined the issues associated with relevant cooperative purchasing schemes - what they do, their nature (all or none, opt in or opt out), scope, and numbers. Eve concluded by suggesting that there is no right or wrong way as it all depends on the nature of the group and the outcomes a group is hoping to achieve. Issues include the possibility that the ‘big deal’ is not sustainable, doubt over the cost/benefit of cooperation, and the problems of negotiating deals that will cater for large as well as small institutions.
Australia
CEIRC negotiates cooperative purchasing of resources on an opt in/opt out basis. There is no central funding. Membership is broadly based. It is a very flexible organization – this works well in the current competitive higher education environment where institutions have varying capacity to pay. Currently there are 71 members, 61 deals, a further 29 deals under discussion, and participation in deals ranges from 2 to 41. There is no model licence, but there is a dynamic checklist of negotiating issues (eg use in ereserve, walk in users). CEIRC negotiates and renegotiates licences as necessary.
The AVCC has attempted to negotiate a national site license for all members, with only partial success. Negotiations for Elsevier’s ScienceDirect did not succeed. Negotiations for Web of Science (WoS) were partially successful – not all libraries participated. Coverage for WoS is from 1992 – the initial deal was for 1997 onwards, then Systemic Information Infrastructure funds enabled the purchase of a 5 year backfile. It was emphasised that for this deal libraries and librarians were once removed from the negotiation process and this may help to explain why a true national site licence was not achieved.
The Senate enquiry of 2003 into ‘Libraries in the online environment’ (http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/ecita_ctte/online_libraries/report/) recommended that the National Library of Australia recommend key databases as potential site licence deals. It is expected that there will be additional government funding.
New Zealand
NZ does have a national site license! See http://www.perna.org.nz/nl/perna.html for details. Negotiated by the National Library of New Zealand, and only recently concluded, the licence covers 2 Ebsco and 11 Gale databases for all libraries in all sectors. There was no central funding but the Ministry of Education did fund for all schools.
Another NZ government initiative was to recommend funding for the purchase of Elsevier ScienceDirect and Web of Science for tertiary and Crown Research Institute libraries for 1 year.
Canada
The CNSLP – see http://www.cnslp.ca/ - has secured desktop access to electronic versions of over 700 scholarly journals plus research databases primarily in science, engineering, health, and environmental disciplines for 64 participating libraries across Canada. Three-year funding was made available, and after this has been used up, libraries may choose to opt in/opt out. CNSLP has a set of licensing principles. CNSLP is now considering Elsevier ScienceDirect.
Also operating in Canada is The Alberta Library, http://www.talonline.ca/. This is a state-based organization with central and state funding. Its aim is to provide seamless access for ‘all people’. Licences are negotiated on a population basis. Its scope is wider than database purchasing, for example reciprocal borrowing has also been negotiated.
United Kingdom
JISC - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ - Joint Information Services Committee - is a very formal and structured organization focusing on further and higher education, and having government funding at its disposal. It has negotiated about 100 licences (see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=coll), plus a further 20 currently under discussion. JISC has a model licence (see http://www.nesli2.ac.uk/model.htm), but there is some doubt as to whether it is being used.
Panel Session 1: Key issues for libraries and users
This became largely a ‘show and tell’ session about what various groups are doing.
The first speaker was Cathie Jilovsky from CAVAL (http://www.caval.edu.au) - an organisation with 11 members, based in Victoria. The CAVAL Task Force on Digital Licences, established in 1998 and now known as the CAVAL Working Party on Digital Licences, focuses on restrictions on use of digital resources. CAVAL’s web site links to a number of useful sites, eg to model licences developed by other institutions. Guidelines (http://www.caval.edu.au/wpr/wpdl/gl/index.html ) for negotiating licences have been developed and are updated annually. Also developed is a Model Licence (http://www.caval.edu.au/wpr/wpdl/ml/index.html). Both the Guidelines and the Model Licence are for use by members as required. CAVAL itself does not negotiate deals and most of its members are also members of CEIRC. Issues identified include the changing nature of students and campuses – they are no longer necessarily in the same place/state/country – and access is not necessarily on site. CAVAL is working on partnerships with other organizations, eg ARL and Solinet
The second speaker was Cathie Pilgrim representing CASL (Council of Australian State Libraries), a group that includes the National Library and the state and territory libraries. CASL negotiates licences for members. They have developed a set of principles to guide licence negotiation – these have been developed to streamline negotiation, increase vendor awareness, and standardise licences.
See http://www.caslconsortium.org/licenceprinciples.html. Cathie emphasised that it is important to have this set of principles, or a checklist. She also commented that not all criteria included in the principles must be addressed for a deal to proceed, but the principles do create vendor awareness.
Julie Rae, representing the Gulliver consortium, emphasised that it is important to evaluate objectively against a checklist, and meaningful usage statistics must be available. She also stressed the importance of trust and respect between libraries and vendors. Gulliver, http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/gulliver/, is a collection of databases with over 21,000 resources including full-text journals, books, newspapers and pictures. Government funding was available initially, and now purchases are funded by participants. All resources are available at nearly every public library branch throughout Victoria and Tauranga District libraries in New Zealand. It is expected that the New Zealand libraries will move to the PER:NA agreement. Gulliver offers a set of core databases, plus other more specialised databases (BRUCE), the latter available to libraries on an opt in/opt out basis. Gulliver does not negotiate licences – instead resources are evaluated to ensure that a set of minimum conditions is met and if so then the licence is signed. Future developments include negotiating print subscriptions.
Richard Sayers, from the Queensland EPA Library, spoke about the QGLC (Qld Govt Libraries Consortium). QGLC is a buying group with a current membership of 14 libraries. The group has demonstrated savings of over $1m in 2002-3, has good relationships with vendors, and has innovative licensing agreements. However, it lacks whole of government support – the majority of government libraries in the state do not participate. Issues identified include vendors wanting to negotiate on the basis of academic licences, site limitations (these are not wanted!), pricing – should be based on actual not on potential users – and vendors’ inability to understand the ‘on-selling’ environment that characterises some government library services.
Further discussion centred on lack of standardisation and availability of statistics and it quickly became obvious that many people present did not know about COUNTER. Other issues included the need to understand that there is a difference between publishers and vendors, disappearing content, and an emerging awareness of models for ebook licensing.
Panel Session 2: Key issues for vendors and copyright/IP owners
Lisa Di Marco from Blake Dawson and Waldron spoke about the report of the Copyright Law Review Commission (http://www.law.gov.au/clrc) and the conflict that often exists between copyright and contract. She suggested that contract provisions are probably not enforceable but there have been no legal cases to date to establish precedents. She recommended that current legislation be amended and that libraries should make their wishes known on the topic.
Julie Stevens from Proquest presented a detailed analysis (see below) of the advantages and disadvantages of consortial agreements for vendors and libraries, and the emerging trends. She considered that consortia are here to stay and that their role should be to maximise returns for all parties, both vendors and libraries.
From a vendor perspective:
Advantages of consortia agreements:
· Renewal income guaranteed, with reduced promotional costs
· Greater, faster market penetration
· Ability to capture market share
· Can offer entry strategy to new markets
· Expanded readership, leading to increased citations, leading to increased demand
· In theory, consortia offer less administration (not necessarily so in practice)
· Possibility of locking in clients on a long-term basis.
Disadvantages:
· Clients shop around for the best deal
· Severe margin reductions in many cases
· Libraries demanding better prices, services, terms and conditions
· Publishers are forced to bid in a competitive landscape
· Increased client power, less individual negotiation possible
· Possibility of losing entire sector if deals collapse or are lost to competitors
· Purchasing efficiencies can be outweighed by administration and management costs
· Dependency on consortium administration efficiencies
· Very little revenue or profit growth for offering more content for very little more money
· Fierce negotiation results in a reduced product offering.
Disadvantages for libraries:
· A consortium is only as fast as its slowest member
· Increased administration costs
· No ability to customise collections or control collection development
· Big deals are too large, too inflexible.
Trends:
· A steadily increasing proportion of publisher sales are to consortia
· In ANZ 80% of electronic sales are to consortia
· There is a need for libraries to state very clearly what their needs are
· Linking is critical
· Partnerships require trust
· Both libraries and aggregators are here for the long haul.
Janette Wright from RMIT Publishing spoke about the difficulties and complexities of full text electronic publishing, particularly in the Australian environment. A publisher must negotiate with a number of stakeholders (publisher, database builder, software owner, CAL) for publishing rights, and royalties are payable at each step. Furthermore, the scholarly publishing market in Australia attracts only a small percentage of money spent by Australian libraries, and the average number of titles per Australian publisher is much less than for overseas publishers. Janette also emphasised that drawing up definitions is time consuming, and another consideration is the user’s capacity (eg connection speed) to access information.
Breakout sessions: issues, priorities and solutions
Following the panel sessions, the delegates divided into four groups (groups were predetermined to maximise cross-sectoral representation) to discuss issues, priorities and solutions, with a break for a delicious lunch while enjoying million-dollar views. Each group then reported back.
All groups had come to broadly similar conclusions, and a number of themes emerged.
The first of these was statistics, statistics, statistics – are they available, are they what we want, are they qualitative as well as quantitative.
Standardisation was another issue, including for statistics. As mentioned previously, many of the delegates did not know about COUNTER, and were reassured to hear that there were international efforts to provide some standardisation. Standards were also wanted for terminology.
The importance of developing and maintaining good communication between all parties – libraries, vendors, publishers – was mentioned several times. We should all work to understand each other’s point of view.
Archival access was a concern of many present. One person suggested that pay-per-view was one way of dealing with this issue.
Pricing models attracted some discussion, including in terms of flexibility and transparency.
Multiple user interfaces was also mentioned, and it became apparent that some delegates were not aware of developments in this area, eg the Ex Libris product as used by AARLIN.
A need was seen for skill sets for librarians and others who negotiate agreements.
Consortia must benefit all members.
Vendors should play a part in compliance, eg by providing a click-through agreement. We could reasonably be expected to be held liable for what library staff, do but not for what our users do, even if the users are advised of expectations.
Wrap up
It was agreed that there was considerable consensus on the issues. The discussion then moved on to possible future roles for ALIA. These included:
· Acting as a third party/intermediary/broker for libraries. The ALIA CIPS service for members (http://alia.org.au/members-only/cips.html) was mentioned.
· Continuing to lobby as needed on copyright issues.
· Offering relevant CPD activities. A web-based consortial information clearing house was suggested.
· Working to standardise terminology for use by libraries, vendors and publishers.
· Promote the COUNTER standard.
· Work with ALIA’s ASSIG (ALIA Serials Special Interest Group) to avoid duplication of effort.
Sue Dowling and Tony Millett
25 February 2004
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