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License to ILL
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for August 2004
"Subscribers who use foul language
. . . shall have their accounts terminated without compensation."
"Authorized Users who use remote access to access such Licensed Content must do so only from their personal/individual computers from home, and not from another location or institution, regardless of whether such institution is a subscribing institution itself, without the prior written permission of [firm name]."
"Our license with a certain publisher who will remain nameless requires that we ‘maintain base value’ regardless of what journals we remove from the agreement. In other words, they will charge us the same amount of money next year as they did last year (plus inflation!) even if we are subscribing to fewer products. Naturally, if we add anything to our license the price goes up. When our legal department asked the publisher what their business rationale for this provision was, we were told, ‘We seek to increase the value of our licenses.’ Translation: ‘We want your money and don’t care how we get it.’"
Last year, I asked folks to send me examples of terrible licensing provisions. I promised not to name names, so I thank in confidence the people who sent me the above winners.
I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to unleash them, and that moment crystallized at a Faculty Senate meeting here at the University of Washington a few months ago. (I imagine most of you have never experienced a meeting with over 100 university professors; it’s not nearly so gripping as you’d think.)
At this meeting, library Director Betsy Wilson and Joyce Ogburn, the associate director for collection management, made a presentation about the continuing serials licensing problem—or at least that’s how it started. They recited the usual statistics about the rise in serials costs compared to those of monographs and the overall inflation rate, ran through how much they’ve had to cut over the past decade, and sent a mild shudder through the group by sharing just how much (seven digits!) we paid Elsevier per year for our “bundle.”
Well, truthfully, we faculty have heard this all before over the last several years. We occasionally have to determine which journals we don’t really use but would like to have around just in case, let a few of those go, and then soldier on for a couple more years. So in one sense, this wasn’t really news.
Don’t just talk—act!
However, this was more than just hand-wringing and warnings about future title cuts. Academic librarians nationwide are pretty fed up with this ongoing fiasco and are mobilizing themselves and their constituencies to think about what we might actually do about it. Betsy and Joyce suggested a list of actions that faculty might take: rethinking where and how we publish, inviting librarians to faculty meetings for discussion, refusing to serve on editorial boards of usurious publishers, self-archiving, publishing in open-source journals—that sort of thing. (See more at www.lib.washington.edu/scholcomm/.)
One poor brave soul even admitted (in public!) to being the editor-in-chief of an Elsevier journal and professed to have no idea of the company’s practices and pricing policies. That may sound disingenuous, but I believed the guy; faculty can be remarkably oblivious to things that don’t directly affect them.
Then something remarkable happened. As this thoughtful and reasoned discussion was wrapping up, our university president, Lee Huntsman, arose (all 6-foot-plus of him). He’s got a kind of aw-shucks quality about him, which he employs very effectively. He thanked Betsy and Joyce and told the assembled faculty that this was not just the library’s problem. Yes, librarians bear the brunt, but the current situation is a sea change (and I’m paraphrasing here); if the journal mess doesn’t get cleaned up, and quick, we could find ourselves with diminished opportunities to publish our work, which will impact the ways in which we do our research, train our graduate students, and think about tenure and promotion.
You could feel the temperature in the room drop about 15 degrees. This hit people where they live. You can talk about journal title reductions till you’re blue in the face; but when the president tells faculty they’ll have to work differently or less well, it gets their attention right quick.
I’m pleased that our library system is one of those thinking hard about this. Whether any of these ideas will work remains to be seen. At least the academic librarians are thinking of creative ways out of a potentially disastrous situation, and might even change scholarship for the better in the process . . . but that’s another story.
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