NATIONAL SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS FORUM
ROUND TABLE 12: STRUCTURES OF SCHOLARLY
COMMUNICATION
Canberra, 8 August 2001
National Site Licensing
I should like to begin by thanking the National Scholarly Communications Forum for inviting
me to talk this afternoon about national site licensing with particular reference to the Australian
situation. It is in many ways a difficult topic, touching as it does on the nexus between
cooperation and competition both in the marketplace and, in this case, in the higher education
sector. And if it is an approach sometimes difficult to comprehend in theory, let me assure you
it is no less difficult to implement in practice, as recent experience in trying to negotiate such
arrangements in Australia has demonstrated. However, national site licensing in relation to
electronic resources is, I believe, a key approach to building the robust information
infrastructure that is essential to support the national research effort. It provides an effective
response to the challenges of today, of the real world which confronts us all. And it is that real
world, the world as it is and not as we would want it to be, that we have to engage.
I should perhaps first admit to having a personal interest and involvement in the negotiation of
collaborative purchasing agreements with vendors of electronic information resources on behalf
of Australian universities, firstly, as a member of the Council of Australian University
Librarians Electronic Information Resources Committee (CEIRC) and secondly, as a member
of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee’s national site licence negotiating team. What I
shall say today should not be construed as representing the views of either body. My comments
reflect my own opinions and beliefs and I alone am responsible for them.
I shall start by trying to present some definitions, for example, just what do we mean by
national site licensing. Then I would like to look at the international precedent, at some
examples of national site licensing programs in the United Kingdom and Canada. I shall
subsequently discuss developments in Australia and end by trying to identify the major issues
surrounding the adoption of a national site licensing approach.
Some definitions
The application of the term ‘national site licence’ in practice usually conflicts with its apparent
meaning. Only on very rare occasions does the licence give all citizens of a country equal
access to the resource in question. There are exceptions. Just a couple of months ago a
committee appointed by Iceland’s Minister of Education, Science and Culture negotiated an
agreement which will give all its citizens access to ISI’s Web of Science, a major crossdisciplinary citation indexing database. In this case, it is probably significant that it is Iceland –
in other words, the ability to even entertain such a comprehensive licence is a function of size.
Elsewhere, ‘national’ usually means countrywide in relation to a particular sector, for example,
the higher education and/or research sector. And it seems to me such a limitation is both
reasonable and practical, given the utility or relevance of individual resources. The term ‘site
licence’, of course, simply implies that all members of the community for which the licence is
negotiated have equal access to the licensed resource. In the case of the higher education sector,
that would generally mean all staff and enrolled students of a university.
Implicit in national site licence arrangements is the assumption that licences are negotiated for
and will embrace the members of a consortium. And to separate such site licences in which all
members of the consortium participate from collaborative purchasing initiatives conducted for a
specific group of institutions but in which members of that group may choose to participate or
not seems to me to constitute a useful distinction. Sadly, as we shall see, the distinction does
not necessarily hold firm, especially in an international context. To my mind, it is a critical
distinction which not only takes into account the nature and utility of individual resources but
also determines the manner in which access arrangements should be negotiated. At present, I
am glad to say, the distinction is being observed in the higher education sector in Australia, at
least in this very early stage of national site licence negotiation.
Some international examples
In an international context the practice of purchasing access to electronic resources on a
consortium basis is not a recent development. Indeed, there is now an International Coalition of
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Library Consortia (ICOLC) which meets biannually to discuss matters of common concern. In
the United States such consortia are generally regionally based. It is in Asia and Europe, and
most recently Canada, that we find models of consortia formed to meet national needs.
Sometimes consortial arrangements are made simply to purchase access to a single electronic
resource, often as an ad hoc response to the availability of external funding in the form of an
earmarked grant. In other cases, licences are negotiated as part of a continuing program and it
is two such programs, the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI) in the United
Kingdom and the Canadian National Site Licensing Project which I want to discuss briefly this
afternoon.
NESLI
The National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI) grew out of the earlier UK Pilot Site
Licence Initiative which had been established in 1995 by the four separate higher education
funding bodies in the United Kingdom. The pilot scheme was designed to address the problems
arising out of the rapid inflation in academic journal subscription rates, and consequent
subscription cancellations by research libraries, and the restrictions placed on copying and the
distribution of materials by existing copyright legislation. Agreements were reached with
Academic Press, Blackwell Publishers, Blackwell Science and Institute of Physics Publishing
under which from 1996 the publishers provided print journals to universities and colleges
throughout the country at discounted prices, negotiated licences which allowed generous
permissions for copying, and furthermore made available a range of electronic materials. It
should be remembered that in the mid 1990s not all publishers were able to deliver their
journals in electronic form in the manner to which we have become so quickly accustomed.
The pilot received direct government funding in recognition of the innovative nature of the
scheme. It was, after all, the very first time publishers had been asked to provide licences
where the site was in effect the nation. Its successor, NESLI, was established by the Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) in 1998 and contracted a Managing Agent, itself a
consortium of Swets Blackwell and Manchester Computing, to provide services for a three-year
period, from 1999 to 2001. NESLI as distinct from the earlier pilot initiative is designed to be
self-financing and seeks to promote specifically the use of the electronic option rather than the
print, an approach which in the United Kingdom is complicated by the fact that electronic
journals not provided as part of a print and electronic package attract VAT, a tax on goods and
services. It is, I think, important to note that NESLI is not a true consortium model in that
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participating higher education institutions may choose whether or not to sign up to particular
deals and that some aspects of the initiative, such as the determination to provide access to
licensed resources through a single gateway, perhaps not surprisingly SwetsNet, represent an
elaboration of the basic consortium or collaborative purchasing approach. I expect the jury is
still out on its success or failure but it is perhaps significant in terms of its operating complexity
and cost that the recent call for tenders for the role of Managing Agent from 2002 produced just
one, unacceptable response. But it is also, I think, only fair to recognise that the difficulty JISC
and NESLI have experienced in achieving a more rapid adoption of the electronic only
approach derives at least in part from the VAT taxation issue and not simply from the
reluctance of UK librarians and library users to abandon print.
Canadian National Site Licensing Project (CNSLP)
The Canadian National Site Licensing Project which was first mooted in 1999 and has begun
providing access to licensed resources this year has been developed on a true consortium basis
and in an admirably cooperative manner. Its primary goal is
dramatically to increase the quantity, breadth and depth of research literature
available to Canadian academic researchers, and to provide expanded and
equitable access to that content through electronic formats and network
access/delivery mechanisms.
And it aims to achieve that goal
through a coordinated, nation-wide university library initiative to license
electronic versions of scholarly journals and research databases in science,
health, engineering, and the environment, and to provide electronic ‘desktop’
access to this content for the academic community.
The three-year project received substantial seed funding of C$20m from the Canada Foundation
for Innovation and matching funding from universities and provincial governments totalling a
further C$30m. A condition of the seed grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation was
that the project participants, at present comprising 64 Canadian universities, must commit to
continuing the project beyond the expiry of the Foundation’s initial grant. In February 2001 the
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project negotiated its first raft of agreements with vendors for seven resources, including Web
of Science, SpringerLINK and the Academic Press database, IDEAL. It is too early to assess
the success of the project beyond noting its early promise and perhaps also the declared
negotiating tactic of walking away from the table when the negotiations simply are seen to be
too hard or too difficult to resolve.
Developments in Australia
The concerns which led to the establishment of the UK Pilot Site Licence Initiative, and
subsequently NESLI, in the United Kingdom and to the setting up of the Canadian National Site
Licensing Project have their parallels in Australia. Following initial work done by a small
group of university libraries and the CSIRO under the rubric of the ‘Australian Research
Libraries Fighting Fund’, a Coalition for Innovation in Scholarly Communication (CISC) was
formed in early 1999 which included in its membership representatives from the Council of
Australian University Librarians, the National Academies Forum, the Australian ViceChancellors Committee (AVCC), the Australian Research Council, the CSIRO, the National
Library of Australia, and the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA).
In addition to identifying the extent of the research information crisis afflicting university and
research libraries in Australia and the need for a greater level of collaboration and innovation in
response to that crisis, the Coalition saw as one of its key roles the fostering of a greater
appreciation or understanding of the radical changes that were occurring in the processes of
scholarly communication among key stakeholders, including university management,
government policy makers and industry. Coinciding with the work of the Coalition in this
respect were two other national initiatives with a somewhat broader brief, the holding of a
National Innovation Summit in February 2000 which spawned a report (Innovation: Unlocking
the Future) in August 2000 prepared by the Innovation Summit Implementation Group, and the
Australian Science Capability Review conducted by the Chief Scientist, Dr Robin Batterham,
who issued a detailed discussion paper, The Chance to Change, in August 2000.
Among the many major recommendations made by the Chief Scientist was one that was critical
to the implementation of national site licensing in Australia. Recognising that the transition
from paper based publishing to digital publishing raised a number of important issues that had
yet to be resolved internationally, Batterham recommended, under the heading Information
Infrastructure, that a pilot scheme be developed to test a national site licence concept between
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higher education institutions and publishers. The recommendation survived further scrutiny
and was included in the Chief Scientist’s final report to the Commonwealth Government in
November 2000. Subsequent to his report, the AVCC’s Standing Committee on Information
Policy (SCIP) established a group of four working parties to consider issues relating to
scholarly communication, one of which focused on the National Digital Information Resource.
This working party was asked to consider the recommendation:
That earmarked funding be sought from the Government to underwrite the
national provision of digital information resources for research, particularly in the
science, technology and medical disciplines, for a transitional period of three
years to provide Australia’s research community with timely and cost-effective
access to relevant global research information and knowledge.
The working party discussed the recommendation under a series of six headings or terms of
reference and submitted its response in a report to the Standing Committee in May this year.
In the meantime, the AVCC decided to take the initiative and begin negotiations for national
site licences with two major publishers, Elsevier Science and the Institute of Scientific
Information (ISI). A negotiating team was formed and the first meeting with Elsevier in
relation to their electronic journal database, ScienceDirect, was held in late March. These
negotiations with both Elsevier and ISI, in relation to Web of Science and Current Contents,
continue with the prospect that any agreement, for a multi-year term, will take effect from
January 2002. Discussions have also been held with DETYA in terms of the provision of
external funding, with the possibility that such funding might be available from the Systemic
Infrastructure Initiative, a scheme established in line with the recommendations of the Chief
Scientist’s Science Capability Review report and first announced by the Government in its
strategy document, Backing Australia’s Ability: An Innovation Action Plan for the Future,
issued in January this year. Although the negotiations are being conducted on behalf of AVCC
member institutions and the CSIRO, consideration is being given to extending the coverage of
any licences to the New Zealand universities and the University of the South Pacific, as well as
other Australian research organisations, but on the basis of separate negotiations.
I should add that while the AVCC has been negotiating on behalf of the higher education sector,
a consortium of the Council of Australian State Libraries (CASL) has been conducting similar
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negotiations for Australian state and territory libraries and the National Library of Australia for
access to a range of resources appropriate to that sector. I understand that access is currently
being provided on a 12-month trial basis to four databases, RMIT Publishing’s Australian
Public Affairs – Full Text, Dun & Bradstreet Australia’s Business Who’s Who of Australia and
Jobson’s Online, and the Gale Group’s Health and Wellness Resource Centre. On account of
organisational complexities, access is at present limited to walk-in users at the state and
territory libraries and the National Library.
The national site licensing approach
I mentioned earlier that national site licensing posed some difficulties both conceptually and in
terms of its implementation, and I would like to spend the rest of the time available to me this
afternoon in discussing these issues.
The primary issue relates to the feasibility, or perhaps desirability, of collaboration on such a
coordinated national scale within what is increasingly a highly competitive higher education
sector in Australia. The advocates of national site licensing would argue, as I do, that key
information resources should be regarded as essentially precompetitive in nature, that is, that
libraries should not treat the mere acquisition or provision of access to a particular electronic
resource as giving their parent organisation a competitive edge, for example, in the recruitment
and retention of quality staff and research students. For my part, I would argue that is not the
input, the availability of access to a resource, but the output, the use to which that resource is
put by the university community, which should be seen as contributing to any competitive edge.
And if we can accept that such resources are precompetitive, as the university librarians did at
their last plenary meeting in March this year, then we can begin to argue that they do form a
proper part of the national research infrastructure, just as much as well equipped laboratories or
access to high-capacity computing networks. I understand the almost instinctive wish to protect
a perceived advantage, since at my own institution we took a substantial risk last year in
purchasing access to a major database at what for us was a very high cost in terms both of price
and of potential lost opportunities. Why should others have the chance to close that particular
gap without taking a similar risk or making a comparable investment? What we do have to do,
I think, is raise our gaze, recognise the breadth of the Australian research community, see
ourselves as a component of a national research infrastructure and remember the national
interest.
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Even if we accept the precompetitive argument, why do key resources have to be provided on a
national site licence basis rather than purchased collaboratively for those institutions for whom
the provision of access forms a high priority.
After all, CAUL through its Electronic
Information Resources Committee and its predecessor the Datasets Committee has for many
years negotiated access to electronic resources on just such a collaborative basis. The extent of
CAUL’s work in this area is in fact probably not widely known. At last count, CAUL had 32
electronic resources or products for which its members and its colleagues in New Zealand had
access by way of collaborative purchase agreements. It is a question, I think, of horses for
courses.
Where the essentiality of the resource in terms of the national information
infrastructure is beyond question, the consortium approach is required. In all other cases, the
existing collaborative purchasing arrangements should suffice. Establishing that essentiality is,
of course, not always easy. I expect nothing is, in the real world. But the test should always be
the criticality of access for our research community, irrespective of location or affiliation.
One of the realities of trying to negotiate site licences for key resources on a national basis is
that in terms of subscribers we are not entering an unploughed field. In the case of Elsevier, for
example, just over 20 per cent of the 38 Australian universities already subscribe to the
complete ScienceDirect package.
The other institutions subscribe to a range of selective
combinations of their journals, both print and/or electronic. And the percentage is the same in
the case of ISI’s Web of Science, although with possibly a somewhat lower take-up among the
other universities of their parallel citation indexing services in alternative electronic and print
formats.
In addition, in the case of Elsevier, these subscriptions have not before been
negotiated on a national basis, which has led to a fragmented market and a marked variation in
pricing across the sector.
The consequence is that prior purchase decisions inevitably
complicate the response of universities to any consortium offer, especially in a time of severe
financial constraint and tight library budgets, and tend to distort the impact of intra-consortium
cost allocation models. There is, to my mind at least, no doubt that the proposals being looked
at in terms of national site licensing represent high value in relation not only to cost but also to
existing expenditure. And the use of the collective muscle available to national site licence
negotiators does ensure that the global cost or price is keen, certainly in relation to what
individual institutions can obtain on their own. But the reality is that if the extra funding
required to capture that additional value is not available in the early years of a multi-year
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agreement, the opportunity is likely to be lost, to the detriment not simply of a particular
university but also of the national research community.
That then is the primary rationale for seeking external funding, to render affordable national site
licensing opportunities by allowing universities to realign expenditure decisions and practices
during the term of multi-year agreements and so ensure the sustainability of such agreements
over time. But there is another, perhaps less mercenary, reason or benefit. As we have heard
today, the existing models for scholarly communication are under threat, not just in terms of a
migration from a print to an electronic environment but also in terms of the roles of the major
players themselves. There is much debate as to the speed with which some of these changes
will occur, in relation to technology, the editorial process, and intellectual property rights. And
I should confess to being on the conservative wing in this debate, especially as it affects the role
of the market, the commercial scholarly publishing industry. But however quickly or slowly
these changes occur, there is no doubt we are already in a period of transition from one model
to another and that the higher education sector needs some assistance in remodelling its own
information infrastructure. The adoption of national site licensing techniques to ensure equal
access to key electronic resources across the sector is an essential component of that
remodelling process. Some may argue that we should simply stand back and wait for the long
promised nirvana. To do so, in my view, would be to abdicate our responsibility to support the
national research effort, in effect, to play a card to which we have no right.
Later today there will be a function to launch a new reciprocal national borrowing scheme
under which students and staff of AVCC member universities will be able to borrow materials
from other university libraries when they are travelling, working or studying interstate. The
scheme supplements the interlibrary loan system which has long given access, at a distance, to
resources held in the nation’s academic libraries. The national borrowing scheme has been
given a catchy title, University Library Australia. Maybe I am drawing a long bow, but what
we are trying to do with national site licensing in an electronic environment is something
similar. It might be called a national digital information resource rather than a library as such, it
might reside on a number of servers rather than within many library buildings across the
country, and it may involve dollars rather than simple changes in policy to implement, but the
rationale for its introduction and development remains the same. Perhaps it is just a matter of
thinking nationally rather than locally, of asserting that ready access to information, the global
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research literature, should form an essential part of the national research infrastructure. We
have said this many times before. Now we have a mechanism to do something about it.
Vic Elliott
University Librarian
University of Tasmania
7 August 2001
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