ALA Midwinter discussion, January 21, 2006
Janus Challenge 4
Licensing Principles (AKA Publisher Relations)
Breakout discussion at ALA Midwinter CCDO meeting
January 21, 2006
Proponent Group Participants:
Ivy Anderson (California Digital Library), Ivy.Anderson@ucop.edu
Susan Barribeau (Wisconsin), sbarribeau@library.wisc.edu
John Ingram (Florida), jeingr@uflib.ufl.edu
John Saylor (Cornell), jms1@cornell.edu
Charles Spetland, convener (Minnesota), c-spet@umn.edu
Jim Stemper (Minnesota), stemp003@umn.edu
Challenge 4 Licensing Principles: Action Report
The original Janus statement #4 was entitled “Publisher relations.” The original group discussion at Cornell, and the subsequent November 2005 follow up conference call (Dianne McCutcheon, convener (NLM), Frances Kathleen Groen (McGill), John Ingram (Florida), Ann Okerson (Yale), Victoria Owen (Toronto), Cynthia Shelton (UCLA), Charles Spetland (Minnesota), distilled the conversation to a focus on “last frontiers in licensing” (see previous post).
The January 21 group affirmed the importance of sharing information openly between ourselves, and establishing a united front amongst ARL libraries. In general, all are averse to non disclosure clauses, and in reality very few exist any more (Minnesota still sees them in several business databases). There is support for the notion of freely sharing summary information on our licenses but most see the likelihood that institutions and regional consortia will continue to negotiate individually and independently.
In the meantime, standards for publicly posting license and business terms could be drawn up. The differences between some publics and privates in what they can or must do, or not do, was recognized. There is also an obvious concern for avoiding any anti trust implications. All agreed that the first step is to be upfront with vendors that we are sharing information amongst ourselves. We also recognize that it is not just academic libraries that are affected by actions that we take or might take. Perhaps CLIR and Liblicense might continue to play roles by hosting a site posting model licensing components such as standardized wording for perpetual access, archival deposit issues for national review. It is recognized that there is a lot of coordination and human effort that must go into maintaining such a site and keeping it up to date. Still, even just being able to see what terms Institution X obtained on a certain date and whether its license is finalized or not (even if the info is not updated later) may be of immense value in the short term.
CDL’s 2005 success with Nature Publishing Group in securing new perpetual access rights was noted. This example shows the importance of rallying faculty and administration to the library’s side when taking tough negotiating stands (i.e. being willing to say No to a license is necessary if we are to truly “make every effort,” as the original Janus proposal says, to ensure that licenses have what we need).
Getting back to the original Janus Publisher Relations statement, could we not also broaden discussion to include more positive collaborative aspects of working with publishers on new models? For example, what would a national site license look like? Who could draft or define the scope of such a license? Canada, the UK and some other European countries have government funding for their national site licenses, a model probably out of the question here. Representatives from regional consortia could look at available models. Possible interest and role for ICOLC (their next meeting is in March)? Would CLIR consider hiring a consultant to explore models and draft an RFP? Before moving any further, we all need to discuss with directors and staff at our individual institutions. What implications would this sort of approach have on existing agreements?
Each of the six individuals participating in the discussion enthusiastically agreed to continue to work together (and with others) on next steps, once the process is more fully understood.
Charles Spetland (Minnesota)