Scholarly Communication Toolkit

Licensing of Electronic Content

The first experiment in large-scale access to electronic content (Elsevier's TULIP), made journals available as licensed materials, rather than titles purchased by libraries. This placed access to electronic journals in the framework of contract law, rather than copyright law, and this has become the standard model. Licensing has added a layer of complexity to library work in a number of areas including acquisitions, interlibrary loan, document delivery, and electronic reserves. Suddenly, instead of purchasing materials and loaning them under the first sale provision in the copyright law, libraries are paying for temporary access that can be restricted by use, delivery mechanism, and specified clientele.

There are other problems with a licensing model. Publishers, for the most part, do not guarantee permanent access to their products. Licenses often prohibit libraries or consortia from sharing the terms of the agreement with others.

Bundled or Aggregated Subscriptions to Electronic Journals

Aggregating services have been used by libraries and publishers for many years. These "middlemen" services include subscription vendors,such as EBSCO, who typically perform such functions as handling orders, billing, payments, renewals and cancellations. Publishers use fulfillment houses to manage subscriptions and distribute print publications. Libraries joining together in consortia to leverage buying power is another form of aggregation. Libraries and publishers both have realized cost savings and efficiencies by using aggregators.

The electronic environment has presented publishers with a new way to aggregate (without the middlemen) by bringing content together and offering all of a publisher's electronic journals to libraries as a package. With the emphasis in the electronic environment on the aggregation of content rather than services, many traditional aggregators, in danger of being disintermediated, have redefined their businesses. The traditional indexing and abstracting services have enhanced their databases by licensing the rights to include full text. Subscription vendors have created new lines of business providing access to large numbers of journals from a variety of publishers. Some primary publishers, such as Elsevier Science and Academic Press, have decided to take on the role of aggregator, maintaining control of their content and its distribution. Many scholarly societies continue to aggregate their own titles as they did with their print journals (for example, ACS, ACM, and IEEE). [1]

For publishers, bringing all electronic journals together in a single database allows the development of sophisticated search engines and other services. Libraries can still realize processing efficiencies, and can often provide access to more content by subscribing to the aggregator's packages. On the surface, this all appears to be a good deal.

How the "Big Deal" Works

Aggregations by commercial publishers, often called the "Big Deal", are marketed by publishers as a way to cap inflationary journal prices. If a library licenses all of a publisher's electronic journal titles, that library will pay an amount roughly equal to current payments (for the current subset of the publisher's titles that a library already gets) plus some increment. The library can usually buy additional print copies for a discounted price and cancel some print copies for a small savings. But the content is now bundled so that electronic subscriptions cannot be cancelled; or, if they are, the realized savings is very small. These packages are usually multi-year deals, so significant portions of a library's budget are committed for a period of time, with little or no flexibility.

Caveat Emptor

While there are some short term advantages to the "Big Deal", there are also long term implications for purchasing aggregate subscriptions, some of which are problematic. Issues which must be considered include the following:

• Libraries lose control over selection decisions and may not be able to meet the changing needs of faculty, researchers, and students. Libraries cannot cancel titles that may no longer be useful to a campus, or may have declined in quality. Similarly, a bundled plan may include titles that never would have been selected by librarians or faculty, either because they are not needed or are not of sufficient quality. Bundled content with long-term subscriptions offers publishers little incentive to terminate lower quality titles.
• Libraries may end up committing larger proportions of their collections budgets to fewer publishers. The result is that libraries are less able to purchase new titles from other publishers, and may even result in the need to cancel some currently subscribed titles.
• The Big Deal can have an exclusionary effect on competition and the entry of new journals into the market, affecting the entire scholarly community. Ironically, these packages of electronic titles serve as an effective barrier to new journals at the same time that advances in electronic publishing would make it increasingly feasible for smaller, non-profit, or alternative publishers to enter the market.
• Libraries typically spend 70-80% of their collections budgets on serial subscriptions. In general, subscription prices are much higher for commercially produced journals than for non-profit journals. A 2001 study finds that the average price per page for elite journals is about six times as high as for non-profit journals, and shows similar results for less prestigious journals. [2]

Recent Campus and Library Responses to the Big Deal

In a 2002 survey conducted by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), 65% of responding libraries with subscriptions to Reed Elsevier's electronic journals also subscribed to their bundled offering, ScienceDirect, in a multi-year deal. In a 2003 survey of 57 libraries, 22 indicated they were planning to cancel or considering canceling a bundled package. [3]

Actions taken are not limited to ARL libraries and include the following:

• Cornell University's annual bill for Reed Elsevier's ScienceDirect package reached $1.7 million in 2003. Those 930 titles amounting to less than 2% of the serial subscriptions, accounted for more than 20% of the Library's total serials expenditures. The Faculty Senate unanimously supported the Library's plan to retain control of serials expenditures by moving away from the bundled package and canceling a number of Elsevier titles.
• Harvard University, with a larger serials budget than any other academic library in the country, also canceled ScienceDirect which cost them four times more than the expenditure for the next largest STM journal publisher. Sidney Verba, library director, wrote that the decision was driven not only by financial realities but, more importantly, by the need to reassert control over collections and encourage new models for research publication.
• The Triangle Research Libraries Network, a consortium consisting of Duke, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina, declined to renew their subscription to ScienceDirect. They cite significant annual cost increases above the current contract terms and no-cancellation policies as being unsustainable for TRLN libraries. Four small private Minnesota Colleges, Carleton, Gustavus Adolphus, Macalester, and St. Olaf, independently decided to decline a three year renewal of ScienceDirect in February of 2004, citing escalating prices and an unsustainable pricing model.
• The University of Maryland and the University of Minnesota also refused the Big Deal subscription with ScienceDirect in 2004.
• The University of California renewed its subscription, but only after some hard bargaining. The chancellors at all nine UC campuses announced that if the jointly negotiated agreement failed, no individual campus would be allowed to negotiate separately with Reed Elsevier. The end result is that the UC system will spend about 25% less on Elsevier journals in 2004 than they did in 2003. The Academic Senate issued a Letter to University of California Faculty on Negotiations with Elsevier and System-wide Efforts to Effect Change in Scholarly Communication.

Another alternative:

• The OhioLINK academic library consortium has a different perspective on big deals. This consortium actively supports changes on the publisher side in reforming scholarly communications, but also believes that libraries must reorganize and reorient themselves to take full advantage of digital information systems. Here, statewide cooperation allowed for negotiating licenses that they find have been advantageous to libraries throughout Ohio.

Factors to Consider

As libraries consider package deals locally, they should ask a number of questions: [4]

• What is the value of the content to the clientele?
• How many titles of a package does the library already subscribe to? If the library is subscribing to a large percentage of the titles, it may make sense to subscribe to an entire package. If not, do the added titles support campus programs?
• Does having common interfaces and the ability to search across titles make the package valuable to the clientele?
• Can the library select titles within a package?
• Can the library cancel print subscriptions, or are these bundled with the electronic version?
• What happens to the price at the end of the subscription term?
• What options does the library have for canceling subscriptions at the end of the term? Is there a threshold below which, the bundle offer will be withdrawn?
• If the library is no longer able to afford the package, what will be the ramifications on campus of the content no longer being available?

Learn More

Aaron S. Edlin & Daniel Rubenfeld, "Exclusion or Efficient Pricing? The 'Big Deal' Bundling of Academic Journals" ABA: Antitrust Law Journal 72, no.1 (2004):119-157.

Kenneth Frazier, "The Librarians' Dilemma: Contemplating the Costs of the 'Big Deal'" D-Lib Magazine 7, no.1 (March 2001).

Sanville, Thomas J., " A Method Out of the Madness: OhioLINK's Collaborative Response to the Serials Crisis Three Years Later: A Progress Report" The Serials Librarian 40, no1/2 (2001):129-55.

1. Mary M. Case, "Trends and Issues" in Implications of Aggregate Subscriptions to Electronic Journals, EBSCO Information Services, Vantage Point Series, no.55 (Jan/Feb/March 2001):3-5.
2. Carl T. Berstrom and Theodore C. Bergstrom."The Economics of Scholarly Journal Publishing". 2002; updated 2006. See the table "Journal Pricing Across Disciplines".
3. Mary M. Case,"A Snapshot in Time: ARL Libraries and Electronic Journal Resources". ARL . No. 235 (August 2004):1-10.
4. Mary M. Case, "Trends and Issues" in Implications of Aggregate Subscriptions to Electronic Journals, EBSCO Information Services, Vantage Point Series, no.55 (Jan/Feb/March 2001): 3-5.