CO-OPERATION IN THE UK FOR THE PURCHASE OF ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS

Frederick J. Friend, Director Scholarly Communication, University College London

Virtually every publication that a university lecturer or a university student might need is now available in electronic format. Most journal publishers now make the full-text of their journals available through the World Wide Web but most libraries still choose to purchase the paper versions. If we are to benefit from the electronic revolution we shall have to find ways of purchasing electronic publications which respect the independence of each library to take its own decisions and yet which also help libraries to purchase the publications they cannot afford to purchase. JISC was set up by the four UK Higher Education Funding Councils to promote the development of electronic information in UK universities. We do have regional library organizations and some electronic resources are purchased on a regional basis, but the best deals are those negotiated by JISC on a UK-wide basis. No library is forced to purchase any publication for which JISC has negotiated a national deal. They can decide to participate in one purchase but not in another. There has been a progression in consortium purchasing in the UK from the purchase of software through the purchase of datasets to the purchase of the full-text of electronic journals. The negotiation of licences for full-text electronic journals has proved to be a much more complicated matter than the negotiation of licences for datasets, and JISC has set up a special programme for this purpose. The programme is called NESLI, which is the successor to another initiative in the UK : PSLI, or Pilot Site Licence Initiative. PSLI was very valuable, both financially and as experience in negotiating and administering a national licence, but it was only a three-year initiative and the time came to move on from a "pilot" into the kind of long-term arrangement higher education institutions need. A Steering Group has been formed to set up NESLI and to decide on questions of policy. The first key decision was that we should look for a Managing Agent to negotiate with publishers and to administer the new service. JISC does not have the staffing capacity to handle the licencing of hundreds of journals to hundreds of institutions. JISC awarded a three-year contract to a consortium of Swets UK Limited and the University of Manchester to act as Managing Agent for the NESLI service. The procedure we have established is that the Managing Agent negotiates a deal with a publisher, the terms of that deal are circulated to the NESLI Steering Group, and if the Steering Group is happy with the terms, the deal is offered to all university libraries in the UK, potentially 180 libraries. It is then a decision for each library whether or not to buy into the national deal that has been negotiated. Because of the time taken for negotiation very few deals were agreed for year 1999 subscriptions, and only 377 journal titles are currently available, but a large number will be offered for year 2000 subscriptions. The legal arrangements are inevitably very complex and three main contracts have had to be drafted and agreed. Restrictive licensing can be as great a barrier to use of electronic publications as high prices, and we have to ensure that fair use is not only protected but also encouraged. The terms of the licence are also important in order to reassure librarians that the archiving of electronic publications will be possible. All depends now on the detailed negotiations which the Managing Agent are conducting with the publishers. Libraries are looking for a substantial discount on the prices they have been quoted individually. They will not take up any offers through NESLI unless there are savings. One matter to which the Steering Group has already given a great deal of attention is the communication of information to the academic and publishing communities about the scheme. NESLI should not be perceived as solely for the benefit of the academic community. It offers publishers as well as users of libraries opportunities to make the change to electronic publication in a more secure environment than if we act independently. In principle in NESLI we have a product which users will be happy to use. Pricing will determine whether the product lives up to the promise, but the hope is that university students and staff will be able to read as many journal articles as they wish without counting the cost.

Virtually every publication that a university lecturer or a university student might need is now available in electronic format. This represents a great change from the situation only four or five years ago, when very few publications were available electronically. The lecturers and students in our universities are still very fond of the paper publications that they are familiar with, and librarians also are often reluctant to purchase electronic publications because of concern about the long-term survival of electronic text. So we have a gap between large-scale availability and small-scale purchase of electronic publications. For example, most journal publishers now make the full-text of their journals available through the World Wide Web but most libraries still choose to purchase the paper versions. As a new generation of students enters our universities, however, they will expect to find all the information they need available through their computer, because that is how today’s children are growing up. From a very young age they are using computers for study as well as for playing games. The challenge we face is how to prepare for the electronic future.

This morning I shall be speaking about only one aspect of our preparation for a major change from paper to electronic information, and that is how we organise ourselves to purchase electronic publications. The way in which we have organised ourselves for the purchase of paper publications has mainly been that each library has made its own purchases independently of any other library. Librarians have always been willing to co-operate, and most countries in the world have established co-operative organisations for services like inter-library loan. But these services have only been a very small part of the total services which university libraries have offered to their students and academic staff. Most publications that libraries offer to their users have been purchased without any form of co-operation with other libraries. I am not criticising this approach, because each library has to decide what it is best to purchase for its own users. A very centralized purchasing policy would not work. But if we are to benefit from the electronic revolution we shall have to find ways of purchasing electronic publications which respect the independence of each library to take its own decisions and yet which also help libraries to purchase the publications they cannot afford to purchase. One of the biggest barriers in securing the benefits of electronic publications is the price requested by publishers. We have to find ways of organising ourselves so that we overcome the barrier of price if we are to make available to our students and academic staff all the electronic publications that they will need. I have been invited here to talk about how we are organising ourselves in the UK to deal with this opportunity for the purchase of electronic publications. I am not here to persuade you to follow the model we have adopted. We do feel that we have established the structure which suits the culture in the UK but even if we are completely successful, each country has to find the organisational model which suits its own cultural heritage.

The cultural heritage in the UK is one of cautious co-operation. There is indeed a long history of library co-operation in the UK and several organisations which have provided a focus for libraries to share resources. On the other hand there is also a strong tradition of independence, each university being a separate legal entity, responsible for awarding its own degrees and managing its own resources. We have had to find a way of combining these two traditions in the arrangements we make for the purchase of electronic publications. The key organization for co-operation in this area is JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee. The JISC Web site is at www.jisc.ac.uk. JISC was set up by the four UK Higher Education Funding Councils to promote the development of electronic information in UK universities. One pressure we have resisted is the pressure to set up separate organisations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In order to assist university libraries to achieve a cost-effective transition from paper to electronic journals, we decided that we needed an organization that covers the whole of the UK. We do have regional library organizations and some electronic resources are purchased on a regional basis, but the best deals are those negotiated by JISC on a UK-wide basis. JISC’s remit is wider than academic libraries. It also has responsibility for the academic network and for other research and teaching initiatives which are computer-based. But JISC has always had the development of electronic library resources as one of its main objectives and has used a variety of agencies, such as CHEST or Manchester Computing, to achieve that objective. JISC adds value to the work of individual organizations, undertaking work which any single institution would find it difficult or impossible to do. Negotiating with so many different publishers for electronic access to their publications would be so time-consuming for individual libraries that the growth of electronic access would be very slow. The price individual libraries would have to pay for electronic access would be set by what the strongest universities would be willing to pay. All universities benefit from JISC action on national deals, and those who are not large enough to secure good discounts benefit most. However, I said that there is also a strong independent tradition in the UK, and that is reflected in the way JISC deals are offered to university libraries in the UK. No library is forced to purchase any publication for which JISC has negotiated a national deal. They can decide to participate in one purchase but not in another. In theory they could even decide to negotiate the purchase for one university alone of the same publication for which there was a national deal, although common-sense usually prevails, because they would have to pay more for a single deal. It is important to understand this combination of central negotiation with local decision-making in looking at the particular examples of purchasing arrangements in the UK.

There has been a progression in consortium purchasing in the UK from the purchase of software through the purchase of datasets to the purchase of the full-text of electronic journals. The organization which JISC has used on many occasions is CHEST, and the initials stand for Combined Higher Education Software Team, showing the origin of the organization in the area of software. You have probably also heard of BIDS, which has managed many successful JISC services, such as the ISI citation indexes. As each contract is negotiated, JISC looks for an agent to manage the service, because JISC does not have the staff to run the services. The ISI situation is a good example of the way JISC works, because although the old ISI service has been managed by BIDS, the new ISI Web of Science service will be managed by Manchester Computing, known by the initials MIMAS, Manchester InforMation and Associated Services. A contract is placed by JISC with one of its service-providers for a number of years, but the service-providers like CHEST or Manchester Computing have to compete for each contract. This procedure ensures a high quality of service to the end-users in the libraries. This arrangement has worked well for the provision of datasets, and the basic structure is being used as we move into the provision of electronic full-text to end-users. The negotiation of licences for full-text electronic journals has however proved to be a much more complicated matter than the negotiation of licences for datasets, and JISC has set up a special programme for this purpose. The programme is called NESLI.

NESLI is the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative set up by JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee, on behalf of university libraries in the UK for the purchase of electronic copies of academic journals. In addition to the information that I give you this morning, you can find more information on the NESLI Web Site, www.nesli.ac.uk. NESLI is the successor to another initiative in the UK : PSLI, or Pilot Site Licence Initiative. PSLI began in 1995, and we have learned much from experience with that initiative. NESLI is like PSLI in that it is a national initiative to secure better value for UK academic libraries in the purchase of journal subscriptions. And yet in other respects NESLI is very different from PSLI, with different objectives and a different structure. The aim of PSLI was purely financial, to achieve lower prices for journal subscriptions, whereas the aim of NESLI is partly financial but also cultural. NESLI offers higher education institutions the opportunity to make a cultural shift towards electronic information provision in a cost-effective way. NESLI’s objective is still partly financial, in that no cultural shift will be possible unless libraries can be offered prices for electronic access which they can afford, particularly during any period of dual provision of paper and electronic versions. NESLI is also different from PSLI in that NESLI is a long-term initiative. PSLI was very valuable, both financially and as experience in negotiating and administering a national licence, but it was only a three-year initiative and the time came to move on from a "pilot" into the kind of long-term arrangement higher education institutions need. That need is defined in NESLI as being for electronic access to academic journals. We all have our own views about the speed of transition from paper to electronic that is possible or desirable, but there is a consensus that a high proportion of access to journal literature in the future will be electronic, even if paper continues to be the medium of publication for a certain proportion of journals. Many of the deals being negotiated for NESLI are for both paper and electronic subscriptions, but this is seen as part of a transition to electronic-only.

World-wide we are already seeing that when libraries negotiate through consortia, electronic access becomes more widespread and cheaper. One of the principal ways in which this happens is through the negotiation of "all-you-can-eat" deals. Unrestricted access for users of publications encourages growth because it is unrestricted. Any barrier we put in the way of users stunts growth. One of the advantages of electronic access is that a user can be anywhere at any time, without facing the barrier of having to come to a library at the time the library is open. There has been a danger that we will put new barriers in the user’s path. The barrier of restriction of electronic access to certain machines, for example, instead of the user being able to use any machine wherever she or he might be. Access through NESLI will be defined by the acceptance of the user rather than the acceptance of the machine. Unhelpful screens of information can also be a barrier to use. We have all tried to use electronic information sources and given up after ten minutes of frustration trying to work our way through the system to the information we know is there somewhere. The NESLI Steering Group is determined that access will be user-friendly. Access can also be hindered by having to come out of one system and into another, particularly when only a small amount of information is available in any one database. Users will not go to such lengths when only a limited range of information is available. NESLI aims to be big, providing a single point of access to hundreds if not thousands of journals. But we have yet to face and overcome the biggest potential barrier to the growth of electronic access, and that is the barrier of cost. This will be the most important single factor which will determine the speed of take-up of electronic journals, and potentially it is the most important single advantage NESLI can offer. If NESLI can offer unrestricted access on an "all-you-can-eat" basis at a price libraries can afford, use of electronic journals will increase. The Steering Group has not ruled out "pay-per-view" licences if the Managing Agent can arrange a cost-effective deal of that nature, but our preference is certainly for the "all-you-can-eat" approach.

How is JISC working to achieve this aim of easy access to electronic journals? A Steering Group has been formed to set up NESLI and to decide on questions of policy. The first key decision was that we should look for a Managing Agent to negotiate with publishers and to administer the new service. JISC does not have the staffing capacity to handle the licencing of hundreds of journals to hundreds of institutions. An invitation to tender was issued by JISC, a number of organizations submitted bids, and presentations were made by several organizations. The result of that process is that JISC awarded a three-year contract to a consortium of Swets UK Limited and the University of Manchester to act as Managing Agent for the NESLI service. The Steering Group had no pre-conceived ideas about what kind of organization might make a good Managing Agent, and the competition was held according to EU rules. However, as a personal comment, I feel very comfortable with the result of the competition being the appointment of a consortium between a commercial company with long experience of handling library subscriptions and a university computing service with a proven record of providing a service to other universities. Although the Steering Group does not want to tie the hands of the Managing Agent, JISC has a responsibility though the Steering Group to ensure that the Managing Agent sets up NESLI as the higher education community would wish it to be set up. For example, there has been consultation between the Managing Agent and the Steering Group on the offers made by publishers. The procedure we have established is that the Managing Agent negotiates a deal with a publisher, the terms of that deal are circulated to the NESLI Steering Group, and if the Steering Group is happy with the terms, the deal is offered to all university libraries in the UK, potentially 180 libraries. It is then a decision for each library whether or not to buy into the national deal that has been negotiated. There is no compulsion, and each university pays its contribution to the deal from its own funds. In practice, because the subject coverage of each university is different, we are finding that around 40 or 50 libraries will subscribe to each deal that has been negotiated. Once a pattern is established that is acceptable to academic libraries, the Steering Group’s involvement may be reduced, but close collaboration between the Steering Group and the Managing Agent has been vital. So far only deals with two publishers offering 377 journal titles have passed this rigorous procedure and have been accepted by libraries but several other deals are close to completion. Only one deal has been rejected by the Steering Group as being unacceptable but negotiations are continuing with many other publishers. NESLI has been in existence for one year and because of the time taken for negotiation very few deals were agreed for year 1999 subscriptions, but a large number will be offered for year 2000 subscriptions. It is recognised that it will take three years for it to become fully-operational and we want to get it right in the long-term rather than rush into unacceptable deals. We all want NESLI to succeed, and we are working with the Managing Agent and with publishers to ensure that it does.

One area in which the Steering Group felt it had to take the initiative was in the legal arrangements, which are inevitably very complex. Three main contracts have had to be drafted and agreed. First there is the contract between the Funding Councils and the Managing Agent. This contract specifies what we are expecting the Managing Agent to do on our behalf. The contract is complicated by the fact that there are four Higher Education Funding Councils in the UK, one each for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and there is the additonal legal complication that the Managing Agent is not one legal entity but two, a consortium of Swets UK Limited and the University of Manchester Computing Service. The second contract is between Swets UK Limited and each university in the UK. This contract sets out the service which Swets will be providing to the university library. And the third contract is between each university and each publisher participating in NESLI. This third contract is known as the "licence", because it sets out the terms on which the publications are supplied to the university library. What the Steering Group has done is draft a licence which the Managing Agent can take to publishers and ask the price a publisher would charge for a UK-wide service on the basis of that licence. The first NESLI licence was compiled by Emanuella Giavarra, using previous work in this area and ensuring conformity with international practice, such as the ICOLC Licensing Principles. Several members of the Steering Group worked with Emanuella Giavarra on this first Licence, and it has been used successfully for negotiations with publishers. However, we have now replaced this first NESLI Licence with a second version, which is an adaptation of the Model Licence agreed between JISC and the Publishers Association. Restrictive licensing can be as great a barrier to use of electronic publications as high prices, and we have to ensure that fair use is not only protected but also encouraged. The terms of the licence are also important in order to reassure librarians that the archiving of electronic publications will be possible. One of the reasons librarians in the UK have been reluctant to move from paper to electronic publications is that they have been uncertain about the long-term preservation of electronic publications. This is partly a technical issue, but it is also a licensing question, and the NESLI Licence requires publishers to agree some arrangements for archiving.

It is in everybody’s interests that NESLI should succeed. For users of journals there is the prospect of easy access to a wider range of titles than they have at the moment from wherever the user has access to a terminal. Experience of PSLI showed that users will use more journals if a wider range of journals is available to them. For librarians there is the prospect of avoiding separate negotiations for access to hundreds of publications. We have been spending too much time reading the small print in electronic licences. For publishers there is the prospect of savings in marketing and invoicing and also the prospect of exposing their product to the entire academic community. Publishers need their products to be used, and NESLI offers them a huge opportunity to gain acceptance for electronic journals. If all goes well, we could be in a "win-win" situation instead of the confrontational situation between publishers and librarians in the past. All depends now on the detailed negotiations which the Managing Agent are conducting with the publishers. Libraries are looking for a substantial discount on the prices they have been quoted individually. They will not take up any offers through NESLI unless there are savings. The funding councils are not subsidising NESLI in the way that they subsidised PSLI, so savings to libraries will have to come from the reduction in costs publishers will achieve through participation in NESLI. The benefits to everybody involved multiply the greater the take-up by publishers and by librarians. We are aiming big with NESLI because the benefits grow with the size of the scheme. The more publishers and the more libraries in the service, the bigger the benefits to everybody.

One matter to which the Steering Group has already given a great deal of attention is the communication of information to the academic and publishing communities about the scheme. E-mail lists have been established and the NESLI Web site contains answers to some of the frequently-asked questions that have been submitted by e-mail. It is recognised that if NESLI is to be "owned" by the academic and publishing communities, there has to be continuous dialogue. I referred to "ownership" by both academic and publishing communities because this is not an "us" and "them" situation. NESLI should not be perceived as solely for the benefit of the academic community. It offers publishers as well as users of libraries opportunities to make the change to electronic publication in a more secure environment than if we act independently. There have been difficult negotiations on pricing, and no doubt more difficulties lie ahead, but the Steering Group hopes is that there is a willingness for NESLI to succeed. In principle we have a product which users will be happy to use. Pricing will determine whether the product lives up to the promise, but the hope is that university students and staff will be able to read as many journal articles as they wish without counting the cost. At the beginning of this presentation I referred to the gap between the availability of many publications and the small number of purchases of electronic publications. NESLI is an attempt to bridge that gap, by creating the pricing and licencing conditions which will enable libraries in the UK to purchase large numbers of journals in electronic format.