Please note that this is a draft and citations are being added but may not be fully represented in this version.
TERMS 2.0 Section 2: Purchasing & Licensing
This section highlights the practices for the procurement and licensing of content. After selection is made, the license negotiation and procurement process for new resources begins in earnest. If the material to be added is open access, it may be important to establish the relationship between the OA resource and related purchased material. For OA resources added to local collections and repositories, noting the Creative Commons license, which designates the use and re-use of the material, is a significant factor to consider. Another important aspect to occur at this stage is the recording of purchasing and licensing decisions that may have impact on the implementation and use of the content. In particular, this section identifies common deal breakers along with suggestions on how these licensing terms can be negotiated with providers to provide favorable outcomes to librarians.
During the selection process, the checklist/criteria created helps to provide structure for how the acquisitions process occurs. For instance, if in the selection process the decision is made to buy an ebook collection as an evidence-based plan as opposed to an outright purchase or demand driven purchase, this selection criteria dictates how the acquisition process proceeds. For basic resources the purchasing plan tends to be a straight-forward endeavor of working with a third party agent or vendor or directly with a known or established publisher. In some cases, the purchase will be for perpetual access to a historical collection, a single data set, or online journal backfiles. In other cases, when payments end, access to the content that was created/released during the time you paid (and sometimes prior content as well) will still be accessible, but new content may not. Access to this content is referred to as post cancellation access (PCA) or post cancellation entitlements and will discussed further in the section on preservation strategies. In other cases, after paying a one-time fee you will have continuous access to the resource, referred to as perpetual access – but often only for as long as you are paying annual maintenance fees.
Electronic resource licenses have two main sections. The first section outlines the access and content provision made available from the provider to the licensee and the second outlines the business terms for purchasing the access. There may be a third section or addendum portion that outlines the details of the content licensed. In many cases vendors are flexible about the terms they provide regarding the levels of access, but only during the negotiation of the license. That said there are usually clauses within licenses regarding the amount of access to content that can change in a given licensing period. Other concerns that may arise are the access limits imposed on an institution. These can be restrictive in regards to who may access content or from where the access may occur. The general rule of thumb is to try to obtain the broadest reach of access to the broadest constituency. The business terms given can also be general in nature or very specific in how the payment process occurs. For these reasons, part of the purchasing of access and content requires review of both sets of conditions within the license.
“Many new big deal agreements between research institutions and scientific publishers are now being negotiated as ‘offset agreements’. Besides access rights to the publisher’s content, these agreements entitle authors (usually corresponding) affiliated with the research institution to make their articles available as an open access (OA) publication. Offset agreements attempt to link article publishing charges (APCs) with subscription charges, looking to increase one while the other reduces. Some such agreements reduce the APC charge, some allow unlimited OA publishing for a capped amount and others provide a refund or publishing credit”. The purchase of content that includes open access provision or credits is often complex. Micropayment processing schemes are also outlined to help with OA support. Memberships or annual support drives can accomplish the support for open access provision but not entirely. In an environment where each payment for content must be justified to the larger academic or library structure, determining how the mechanisms through which open access purchasing occurs is vital. Lastly, in some cases you may need to make a purchase of locally created content in order to maintain content from faculty who are moving to another institution. Developing a shared understanding of how locally created content may continue to be used locally can fall to librarians to be negotiated.
2.1 Establishing Negotiation Criteria
The employment of selection criteria determining both the need of the request as well as determining how well the content will fit into current content platforms in use is undertaken. These criteria include aspects of the local collection development policies or principles. At the point of purchasing, the first step is to compare the selection criteria against both the content terms desired and the business terms presented by the content provider to determine compatibility. While content may be of value and of great interest to local users, if the business terms are not in line with your institutional business protocols, then the purchase of content can become harder or impossible to achieve.
It is important to be clear what the ‘red lines’ or ‘deal breakers’ are and what can be negotiated to a greater or lesser extent within your local environment.
Basic resources
Not all electronic resources require a license for the content so the negotiation will occur primarily for the purchasing terms. There will probably be a need to create some sort of order for your purchase in your Integrated Library System (ILS) or purchasing management system along with posting the invoice details for payment. If presented with a contract for content, the first step is to ask if the provider will accept the Shared Electronic Resource Understanding (SERU) guidelines for purchasing. The SERU guidelines spell out how the purchase happens and will need edits to reflect the common business practices of your institution. Some institutions prefer a dual signed document and the SERU format can be adapted for this need. If you have to negotiate a contract with the provider for content or service, it is best to have a model record or checklist of terms that are acceptable to use as a starting point. In its most simple form, the checklist looks like this:
Parties involved with the payment transaction
The term of the payment for access/content (a year, two years, in perpetuity)
The amount of the purchase
Any required business terms by your local accounting office
Dual signature and date of signatures
Complex resources
For complex agreements, e.g. large Purchase on-demand acquisitions (PDA)/Demand driven acquisition (DDA)/Evidence-based purchasing (EBP/EBA) programs, complete annual ebook collections, multiple resources from the same provider, big deals for journals, resource discovery systems, streaming or scholarly portals there may be an existing structure in place within your institution regarding procurement. Internal procurement guidelines may be available and procurement services will lead the complete process. Generally, these guidelines provide the roadmap through the procedure on a step-by-step basis.
For agreements over a certain cost, such as the lifetime of the deal, e.g. the total subscription costs over so many years, you may be required to follow specific procurement law. For example, in the European Union you would be required to issue a tender or RFP (request for purchase) in the United States for public institutions. For private and smaller institutions, your financial offices may have a set dollar amount over which a tender or RFP is needed.
In addition, your state, regional, or national library consortia may have already agreed to a license for the resource(s) you wish to acquire. You may find the license may have already covered the negotiation criteria agreed to at a consortia level. If this is the case, check whether you can join an agreement part way through the contract. Even if this is not permitted, it may be possible to adopt the same clauses and contract and opt in at the next available date, e.g. at the next renegotiation of the deal by the consortia.
Open Access
OA material is supported in a couple of ways through licensing criteria. For OA content, there are two licensing models to consider. The first, is an agreement with a commercial scholarly content provider regarding article processing charges (APCs) and the incorporation of these models either as a cost-break or an overall price structure with a subscription purchasing model. The second consideration is model author/publisher agreement for digital scholarship and how to work with faculty on their publishing agreements.
When working on an off-setting negotiation, the agreement should reduce or do away with either the cost paid for APCs in regards to the subscriptions held by an institution or else, should reduce the expenditure on subscriptions by the amount to be paid in APCs over a given time period. This becomes incredibly complex in that content published by any given content provider lags a year behind what is paid upfront for a subscription cost. In most cases, hybrid APCs for articles published in one year are offset against institutions’ expenditure on subscription and licence fees in the following year (Earney article). However, some publishers prefer to give the cost break on the APC charge through use of a specialized code by faculty when they submit their articles for publication. In other cases, a voucher, token, or APC credit provision occurs based on the overall subscription spend by an institution. The off-setting agreements may be set at a consortial level or negotiated at the local level.
When adding OA content to local collections or repositories, assigning a copyright statement allows the author to determine the level of access to the content. Most academic institutions use Creative Commons(citation) licenses. These copyright statement designate the owner of the content and dictate attribution rights but can be as restrictive as to state that re-use of the content by others is not allowed.
2.2 Common Deal Breakers
We have created a list of our top deal breakers for academic institutions when licensing electronic resources. The deal breakers illustrate topic areas that many librarians consider when developing a local model license or checklist:
Quick list of Deal Breakers:
Cost
Technical Access
Site Definition
User Definition
Accessibility Requirements
Usage Measurement
Interaction with Discovery Systems
Indemnification Clauses
Privacy Clauses
Content Transfer Clauses
Exigency Clauses
Venue of Agreement
Perpetual Access Rights/Preservation
Text & Data-Mining
Cost (relative to other options, available budget, etc.)
When working out payment terms, the primary negotiation point is the price to be paid. Do not be afraid to ask for discounts if the volume of business is considerable or if you have quite a bit of business with the provider previously. If your expenditure is to be in the ballpark of a five to six figure sum, then a discount is likely to be available and one should always try to negotiate a 3-5% cost break at the very least.
Determination of cost is often linked to possible usage. Find out if the initial purchase option can be made by number of users/seats or if site license is the only purchasing option available. Since uptake does sometimes take up to two years, start with a lower user-base prior to upgrading to a site license. If this is the case, make sure you include the possible uptick in cost in future budget forecasts, as you do not want a nasty surprise when the subscription costs go up a few years down the line with the move to a larger usage level or unlimited users. The discovery may be that a lower user base is sufficient to providing the access needed. If purchasing an archive or annual eBook collections, ask for a waiver or prepayment option for ongoing access fees with the initial purchase.
Cost is dependent upon the purchasing model used. Will this order be a subscription, an outright purchase of content such as an archive, data set, or set of Ebooks with or without maintenance fees? Are you testing the viability of the content via a PDA/DDA/EBP model of content, or are you choosing a multi-year contract for content? All of these factors determine the final price to be paid.
Tips for containing costs of subscriptions
It is worthwhile to evaluate and know the subject/overlap with existing available content. Using the decision tools noted is section one help with inidcating the overlap between resources. This can lead to a negotiation point by using overlap analysis to discover if content is readily available. For full text database agreements there is a fair amount of overlap between products with similar content bases from the same vendor/provider. If there is a 30% overlap, ask for a 30% discount to avoid paying for the same content twice.
If the content or service is for a niche/small group of people to use, then negotiate for the smallest level of end-users possible or base pricing on the intended user-base from a dedicated department or area. For example, a specialist chemistry resource, should align with the use anticipated from that user community. The same is true for many art related resources as well. It is unlikely that large swaths of a given campus will be utilizing specialized resources and it is always best to start at the lowest level of user limit and build up from there through usage tracking. Graduate students and post degree students use more complex and niche resources. While some resources crossover to higher-level undergraduate programs, there are many others that do not. Determining the demand of a resource upfront helps to define the user level requirements.
Price cap allowances for ongoing purchases
The general rule of thumb is to negotiate for annual price increases of no more than half of the current inflation rate of a resource. On average, cost increases on academic content have been in the 8-12% of the total subscription cost. (cite EBSCO pricing survey here) Most big deal subscription packages are negotiated down to 3-5% of the subscription cost, especially if the negotiation is for a multi-year agreement. Often times a provider/vendor will use a lower price cap as a negotiation technique to entice librarians to purchase multi-year deals. When agreeing to a multi-year subscription, be sure to include an exit clause in case the institution has financial hardship.
Technical access
In today’s academic institution, students and faculty may or may not be located within a single site or even on a particular campus. With the dramatic growth in online learning, many students and faculty are now both teaching and learning far from the parent or main degree granting institution. At many institutions in the United States and in Europe, the standard access protocol used for off campus access to resources are proxies. Proxies can be set-up via Shibboleth, or EZProxy. There is currently a movement underway by the publishing and vendor community to switch access authentication to Rights Access 21 (Rights Access for the 21st Century) known as RA21. This protocol would work through a registration process similar to how circulation management currently works through an integrated library service platform. It is likely that providers will begin to license for RA21 in the near future and you will need to determine if your institution will be willing to utilize this protocol for access. The biggest issue/concern with this authentication model is the privacy of the end-user and how much of their usage information will be made known to the provider/vendor. For some niche/specific resources, access provision is via username/password and you will need to develop a way to handle access to these resources as needed. Lastly, for some extremely esoteric proprietary content platforms, a dedicated terminal will be necessary. When signing an agreement for access to content, make sure the access method employed will work in the way the end users expect.
Current off-campus access methods
EZproxy
LMS/VLE
Open Athens
Shibboleth
VPNs (virtual private networks that allow users to see as though they are on campus/site)
Future method
RA21
Current on-campus access methods
IP authentication
Username/password
Dedicated terminal/single IP
Another technical access aspect to consider is whether you can allow walk-in user access to members of the public who can freely use your campus library. Public institutions in the United States often feel obligated to provide walk-in usage of resources to community patrons. This attitude has shifted in the past decade due to the shrinking of state and governmental support these institutions now receive. As a deal breaker, this condition is not as relevant as it once was.
There are communities that are adjacent to your parent institution such as joint appointment faculty, dual enrollment students, and research start-ups. Publishers and providers consider these communities as auxiliary to current students, faculty, and staff. When reviewing the authorized user community, be sure to identify or include language that will cover research affiliates. This does get a bit problematic if your institution is collaborating directly with private industries on research projects.
Students who are jointly enrolled in multiple campuses may prove to be problematic the user definition as are visiting scholars of faculty from other institutions .Again, using the language of affiliated generally will cover these users but you may find you have to pay more for students in joint-enrollment programs to have access to needed resources.
In the end, the preferred standard is trying to obtain Shibboleth authentication or EZProxy access as the standard. Resources which impose additional access limitations results in the narrowing of who can utilize any given resource and thus the relevance to your end-users. Unless the resource is particularly niche or specialized and aimed at only serving a small constituency on your campus, limited access will become a pain point for you in regards to establishing access and to troubleshooting problems.
The goal of every librarian is to provide unrestricted access to content. However, it is recognized that for cost purposes, it may be necessary to limit the number of users who can access all your resources. Your selection criteria should help in determining how to balance cost versus access to the content desired.
Site
The license definition of “site” can result in technical access issues if the definition does not meet local need. When negotiating for a site license it is imperative to ensure that the local site is defined accurately. With the development of online learning courses and programs, students and faculty are not always limited to a specific geographical area. Students and faculty can literally be all around the globe but still need access to the content purchased locally. Collaborations with campus Information Technology (IT) offices help to insure content can be utilized in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and Learning Management Systems (LMS). It may be useful to have representatives from Campus IT review agreements for compatibility with campus level definitions of site.
Authorized User Definition
In addition to site, the definition of who is authorized user of licensed resources is critical. The best language to use for authorized users is any person “affiliated” with the local institution. This language generally will cover adjunct faculty members, students who may be taking classes at multiple campuses within a geographic region, visiting faculty members, cooperative education programs, and researchers hired to work on specific local research initiatives. It is always better to be more expansive with the user definition when possible.
Authorized user definitions should also include on site visitors/users to the site. Typical language used in agreements is walk-in users or walk-in usage rights. This allows visitors to your site to have local access rights to the same content that students, faculty, and staff have.
Accessibility for those with disabilities
Access to resources is a human right and at institutions of higher education where students pay for an education, this right is tantamount to their success. Resources licensed by libraries should be compatible with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
Write a clause into your license with the expectation of the accessibility level. Try to use the adopted guidelines but also be specific to your institution.
If there is not a current clause in the license agreement covering mobile access, you may consider adding one to cover this type of use by your end-users.
Usage measurement
All purchases resources undergo evaluation for use. COUNTER compliant usage data is the standard for obtaining and recording regularly usage of electronic resources. In cases where COUNTER statistics are not available, then the ability to measure use through web analytics is recommended. If the agreement is silent on providing any sort of evaluation mechanism, again, this is an area to develop local specifications.
It is also important to see what the license agreement says in regards to collecting and using data from your end-users. You will want to make sure that data collected from your end-users does not violate their student privacy rights. This is another place, where Campus IT offices may be good collaborators in both defining what the end-user rights are and what can and cannot be agreed to in a license. One way to develop this language is to utilize the campus policy on end-user privacy and noting any national of state laws to that affect.
Interaction with discovery layers
Prior to the advent of discovery systems and layers, some producers created MARC record sets which were sold separately or alongside content platforms. Many of the license agreements for MARC records restricted the use to single catalog systems or to a single institution. These agreements may need to revisited and renegotiated especially if an institution or organization participates in a consortia catalog with a discovery tool. For future resource records, especially ones which may be in XML format, the ability to use this metadata in the broadest way possible is the preference.
Resources that cannot be added to federated or harvested search mechanisms are effectively invisible to today’s user, who expects a ‘just in time’ approach to resource discovery. This ability to provide access and connectivity to other resources using a third party link resolver at the article level, chapter level, or dataset level, and not just at the title level is tantamount to obtaining optimal usage of resources. Try to work in language that allows for the greatest “share-ability” of descriptive metadata for all resources.
Indemnification Clauses
Indemnification should be mutual to both parties and not favor one or the other. In addition the indemnification should extend not just to the institution/organization but all to of the authorized users. There should be no other clause in the agreement that overrides the mutual indemnification clause.
Privacy Clauses
Restrictive privacy clauses regarding price and details of the agreement are items many librarians try to strike or re-write in order to meet open record laws of a greater body such as a state, province, or nation. Furthermore, it is worth including a privacy clause stating that any information gathered by individual account creation by authorized users will not be sold, offered to third parties, or otherwise re-used with explicit agreement by the authorized user.
Content Transfer Clauses
Content transfer notifications should be given within sixty (60) days of transfer and if significant content is lost then the purchasing institution should have the right to cancel upon this notification.
Transfer Code of Practice can be noted for when content moves from one provider to another. In particular, back-file back issue content should be noted to reside either with the original provider or move to the new publisher/provider. With the transfer of content, access to back volumes/issues can be lost and hard to restore due to the lack of known payment information by the new publisher/provider.
Exigency Clauses
The incorporate a loss of funding clause is important for all institutions in the 21st century. Funding for higher education is reliant upon many factors outside of a given institution and the need to cancel resources due to loss of funding is a very real possibility. This clause is significantly important with multi-year agreements and consortial agreements. If multiple institutions are subscribing to resources together, a clause stating the other institutions will not be liable for picking up costs from the cancellation by a single institution should be included but rather the overall cost of the package will be renegotiated at this point.
Venue of the Agreement
When looking at the contract details check to see which country’s law the contract uses for governing law, e.g. US law, UK law. Always negotiate to get this altered to your own country’s law and if needed in North America, to province or state venue law. Most state institutions are required to change the language to their State or location as standard business terms.
Perpetual access and preservation
Ability to maintain perpetual access to content. This is a tricky clause in that journal content shifts so readily from one provider to another that perpetual access is sometimes not honored by the content purchaser. In regards to e-books, perpetual access is still being worked out by most providers. This clause may be fore-gone if the demand for content outweighs the desire to maintain access in perpetuity. Ask for the provider to participate in an archiving scheme such as LOCKSS, CLOCKSS or Portico. Ask for the ability for local authors to load articles into your digital repository as a way to at least maintain local content creation, use the SHERPA/RoMEO site to check publisher copyright policies and self-archiving. In addition, local authors should be allowed the right to re-use any content as designated in their copyright agreement with the same content provider.
Text & Data Mining
In particular, research institutions should request the ability for authorized users to perform text and data-mining of content for both research and teaching and learning purposes. When negotiating this access, it is best practice to define these uses within the educational context. Provision of text and data mining should not require additional payment or fees by an institution.
Local Model License/Purchasing Guidelines
There are various examples of model licenses available to consider or adopt to a local educational environment.
California Digital Library
Canadian Research Knowledge Network/ Reseau canadien de documentation pour la reserche
Center for Research Libraries
International Coalition of Library Consortia EKUAL (National Academic License for Electronic Resources)
IFLA Licensing Principles
JISC Model Licenses
Northeastern Research Libraries
In some circumstances, an institution may want to make their deal breakers or their model license public in order for content providers to readily customize their agreement. The University of North Texas Libraries provides a good example of a public document to share with vendors of library collections.
2.3 Negotiation & Re-Negotiation of Contracts
At the point of receiving a license agreement for content, the first step is to focus on the local deal breakers or guidelines. Checking the content definition given in the agreement against the order placed is the next step. It is best to keep negotiation matter of fact and straight forward by having a main negotiator at the local institution. This person should be trusted to incorporate all of the main points the local team or library have agreed upon regarding purchasing. The negotiation or re-negotiation takes on on different aspects depending on the type of resource purchased.
Basic resources
For basic resources, the negotiation will take a few hours to a few days at most. In many cases, there are multiple agreements with the same provider, and the criteria check is just insuring the contract terms are the same as other agreements on hand. There may be a bit of back and forth over the pricing and an attempt to negotiate the best annual price increase. Basic resources can be single titles or single platforms of content or can be subject collections or multiple resources from the same provider under the same agreement. In some cases, a content provider may have a signed agreement on hand from the local institution and just ask for an an addendum to that agreement for a new collection or new product. This negotiation is likely to take place via email and concluded fairly quickly between you and the salesperson or license coordinator for the content provider.
Complex resources
Negotiation always takes longer with more complex deals. The complexity may arise due to the purchasing model, setting up an evidence based purchasing plan or demand driven purchasing model and the orchestration details for this purchasing model. If these are incorporated into the agreement, they can be outlined in the business terms section or in an appendices and will need scrutiny. The negotiation may be complex because a decision has been made to either increase or more than likely decrease the amount of content purchased. Technical access is also a point upon which there can be quite a bit of back and forth in reaching the level of access that works best for the local environment. For more complex resources, the negotiation is likely to take between one to three months to reach full agreement by both parties. Data sets are often the most complex resources to license and purchase. With data sets, there may be a requirements of secure server space in order for the data to be used and analyzed by a limited number of authorized users. Many providers of economic data and financial data purge content from time to time so paying close attention to the preservation capabilities of this information is important. There is not a consistent business model for academic purchasing of data and this procurement will require creative approaches to meet the needs of a local environment.
Open Access
As noted above, off-setting is often negotiated in conjunction with a subscription package deal. Determining how to negotiate an off-setting contract depends on whether an institution is negotiating on their own or through a consortium. With multiple libraries involved, the overall cost breaks are likely to be more significant.
One of the consequences of the move to open access and specifically from the funding of APCs payments by the UK and others, is the rise of the ‘hybrid’ journal. A hybrid journal is a journal that includes a subscription element and an OA element. Articles can be published open access for a fee, the APC or Article Publishing Charge. The possibility of publishers charging both subscription fees and APCs for the same content led to the term ‘double dipping’ - where publishers were accused of earning revenue from institutional subscriptions and APC charges - an accusation that was hotly denied by many publishers at the time. This is where offsetting comes in. First introduced by Institute of Physics publishing in 2014 (Geschuhn & Stone, 2017), Lawson defines Offsetting as “recognizing the total spend that an institution makes… …the ‘total cost of ownership’” (Lawson, 2015). This can either be at the local or global level.
Put very simply offsetting is where the total cost of ownership stays the same, while subscription costs decrease as OA content and therefore APC costs increase - global offsetting. At a local level an institution that pays subscriptions and APCs to a journal may see a reduction in the APC charge.
In 2015, Jisc published its Principles for Offset Agreements in which the attributes of individual agreement types were detailed in terms of their contribution to a transition to open access, affordability, ease of administration and transparency (Jisc, 2015)
Some of the newer agreements allow unlimited OA publishing for a capped amount, others provide a refund or publishing credit. An example of one of the newer forms of offsetting agreement is the Springer Compact agreement, which is in place with four national consortia, the Netherlands, Austria, the UK and Sweden and also the Max Planck Digital Library. A number of blog posts are are starting to report on the analysis of the first years of these agreements (see UK - Marques, 2017, and Sweden - BIBSAM, 2018). It is expected that a number of research articles will be published in the coming months and these will be included for reference.
Earney (2018) describes the offset agreements negotiated in the UK in January 2018; American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press, De Gruyter, Georg Thieme Verlag, Institute of Physics, Oxford University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, SAGE Publishing, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley.
However, there is a flaw in the hybrid journal offsetting schemes. This is beginning to be highlighted by both funders, institutions and their consortia. Many funders contribute to APC costs for articles where the lead author is publishing the output of research funded by the particular funder. This is to encourage the transition to OA of all research outputs. In many cases it is being suggested that this transition is not happening and that the hybrid journal is just another legacy of the big deal, alongside historical print spend. In his discussion about the challenges and opportunities for offsetting, Earney (2017) argues that while there is evidence to say that offsetting agreements are reducing the cost of ownership (Lawson, 2016, 2017), the case for offsetting is “clearly far from proven” and that they ”‘have far too easily come to be regarded as ‘business as usual” and even contradictory to the objective of open access.
Schimmer, Geschuhn and Vogler (2015) see the hybrid model as an evolutionary step in the transition from a subscription model to a fully OA business model. Essentially a read and publish model, “which basically converts former subscription charges of institutions into a publishing fee, often also supplemented by a reading fee” (Geschun & Stone, 2017) in the transition from a pay to read to a pay to publish model. Geschuhn and Stone (2017) urge libraries to “to use this transformational phase in order to actively shape the new model according to their needs and to the benefits of researchers” in order to avoid Earney’s business as usual concern.
In order to affect this, the Efficiencies and Standards for Article Charges (ESAC) initiative, hosted at the Max Planck Digital Library, has held a number of workshops, which have attracted interest from Europe, North America and Japan. In 2016, the Joint Understanding of Offsetting (ESAC, 2016) was agreed, this introduces the pay as you publish model as a strategic goal. This was followed in 2017 by a workshop, which aimed to to provide an opportunity for institutions and publishers present to exchange ideas on three topics. After discussion, these became the three principles of the ESAC Recommendations for article workflows and services for offsetting/open access transformation agreements (2017):
Author and article identification and verification
Funding acknowledgement and metadata
Invoicing and reporting.
It is suggested that libraries and consortia wishing to enter into offset deals use these principles, which call for greater automation and efficiencies in the workflow, in negotiation with publisher, use them as an addendum to the deal breakers outlined above. Many publishers may not have the processes and workflows in place to meet the recommendations from the outset of an agreement. Therefore, it is also recommended that these principles are revisited at the evaluation stage along with the transition to open access.
Both Wellcome Trust (2018) and UKRI (UK Research and Innovation, which replace the seven UK Research Councils in April 2018) (Sweeney, D, 2018) are embarking on a review of OA policy, which could signal a change in the future. In Europe, for example, it has been indicated that the European Union’s 2021-27 R&D programme (FP9) will not pay for articles to be published in hybrid open-access (Nicholson, 2018). An interim measure has also been adopted by some funders, such as the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in Austria have a separate policy for hybrid and gold (Rieck, n.d)
Libraries may wish to follow suit and consider their APC spend with publishers that do not support either offsetting as a whole, or a genuine transition to OA via an offsetting model, although this may involve a period of time subscribing to the agreement and assessing the transition (see evaluation section).
If there is a faculty member who has created content locally and owns that intellectual property but is now moving on to another institution or organization, the current institution may wish to license or purchase the faculty’s content from them in order to maintain certain courses. In these cases, you can adopt the SERU agreement to spell out the understanding between the faculty member and the local institution. These agreements consist of:
The parties involved (in this case an individual and a institution)
The amount of the purchase
The timeframe for the purchase to be valid ( this is often in perpetuity)
The ability for the institution to make needed edits/upgrades to the content to insure its timeliness and ability to keep the content accessible within the learning management system (LMS) or virtual learning environment (VLE)
Dual signatory line with dates
Librarians and scholarly publishers worked together to develop a model publishing contract for digital scholarship The model is primarily for OA books and other long form digital scholarship. It is adaptable for new forms of scholarship that are emerging from the academy. As Open Educational Resources (OERs) grow in prominence along with other faculty resources used in teaching and learning, this model provides a mechanism to be used when capturing this digital scholarship in a library collection or repository.
2.4 License Review/Signature
Each institution has a different mechanism for license review. In some cases, the review occurs within the library by librarians trained in contract review and librarians can be the signatory or signing authority for the agreement. Numerous academic librarians hold secondary law degrees and participate in both review of resource agreements and leading copyright work on behalf of the library. In other institutions, contracts may need review by the business or contracts office and the signatory authority resides within these offices. For some US academic libraries, resource contracts are reviewed also by the Offices of Information Technology. In general, the technology offices interest is in reviewing resource agreements for security and privacy risks. In order to fully understand a local campus review of resource contracts, it is helpful to create either a checklist and/or workflow document outlining who needs to see an agreement and sign off on it.
Basic Resources
Negotiation on basic resources tends to move quickly. The review and signature of these agreements should also go quickly. In cases where the license is an addendum to a contract already on file, include a copy of the main agreement when the workflow for review/signature begins. Another way to improve efficiency with this process is to create a cover sheet/profile for the purchase indicating other resources provided by the same platform/provider. When it is a new platform and/or provider for the purchase, ensure that the contract offices or purchasing offices have fully vetted and approved the provider prior to the agreement showing up. This may require the provider filling out additional forms for your purchasing or contracts office.
Complex resources
With complex resources, especially with a RFP or Tender used, there will need to be a significant amount of paperwork included with the agreement. Again, it is helpful to create a cover sheet or summary page outlining the steps involved with the purchase/license agreement. An example can be seen in here
With complex purchases and purchases over a significant amount, the contracts office or purchasing office is likely to want extensive documentation and make a thorough evaluation of both the license the purchasing terms. The review may require multiple members of your campus financial group to sign off or agree to the signature of the agreement. For this reason, the review takes longer as it requires more involvement by other members of campus.
Open Access
With the exception of off-setting deals written into subscription contracts, most OA contracts are between the author and a publisher. In many cases, the library/librarians does/do not see these agreements and the signing authority is the author of the work. For librarians in Europe and the UK, there may be a need to check the agreements against funder requirements outlined to insure no embargoes are added in when a funder designates immediate OA publication or if an embargo period extends beyond what a funder designates. In the US, most APC support occurs with full open access journals as opposed to hybrid journals and the funding supplied must reside outside of grant funded research. Therefore, checking author agreements against fund mandates is not a requirement or role librarians in the US play. In the US, the best practice is to hold workshops and short clinics for faculty on how best to make their works open and most available for reuse by others.
2.5 Working with Other Departments/Areas on Resource Contracts
In addition to working with procurement and contract offices at an institution, there will be times when there is a need to work directly with other areas on campus and even outside of the local environment such as consortia or other libraries in the geographically area. Anytime you work with partners outside a given institution, the time frames needed to both finalize selection and negotiate the contract grow. For a new contract, it is best to start discussions with the parties involved and allow for a nine month to twelve month contract negotiation. When working with contract renewals, this time frame can be shortened by three to four months but will still need extra time to allow for obtaining agreement by everyone involved.
Basic resources
Basic resources such as stand-alone databases and small journal or e-book packages can be readily ordered and licensed through consortia. Most consortia have a model license agreement they use that encompasses the needs of their members and the buying power of multiple institutions can make the cost of a resource much more affordable as well as negotiating a lower annual inflation rate for everyone. In many cases, the local library does not have to sign or agree to a contract on the local level and payment details are orchestrated through the consortia personnel. Renewal information is usually sent out ninety days in advance to allow for re-negotiation as libraries cancel or add on to the purchase.
In some situations, a department on campus wants to license a resource for a limited group of users. Many times, these requests come from specific laboratories and/or the business departments on campus. For example, resources such as taxation databases have limited interest to the majority of resource users on campus but will be heavily used by the department teaching taxation. In these cases, library personnel may help with the purchase and negotiation of the products but not necessarily promote of manage the usage of them directly. In these cases, the work will be orchestrated between one to two faculty members and the departmental office staff to insure the financial reporting structure is in place and that billing occurs consistently.
Complex resources
For large journal packages and collections of databases, consortia again can be helpful in negotiating the best cost and access models. The initial orders and renewals will take longer with multiple parties involved but are worth the length of time spent to achieve the lower cost structures and the greater access models. Title sharing agreements can get very complex in understanding what are part of local title bases and what access comes from the other members participating in the agreement. Part of the negotiation process occurs internally with the consortia on what the title list will be comprised of as well as the negotiation with producer of the content.
With campus departments, complex resources and tools may require specific software compatibility which will need to negotiated and orchestrated through university technology offices. In addition, the technology office may have concerns over the use of certain software/resources with overall technical site security and privacy. It is worthwhile to have a main contact to work with within your local institution’s technology office to help address their concerns and issues. Instructional design groups on campus also need to work directly with library personnel on embedding resources in courseware and/or providing stable links to content from within courseware platforms. When using IP authentication to content, developing proxied links for use in courseware is a chore beyond the capability of most faculty and teaching assistants. Communicating how access is made available to these departments are other areas on campus is important and will be talked about more in the next section.
Open Access
For libraries supporting APCs, the funding sources may be individual departments, research and sponsored program offices, or other faculty administrative bodies on campus. In these cases, the administration and management of the APC funding will need coordination among all the parties involved. With the deposit of electronic theses and dissertations, undergraduate programs producing content that gets into library repositories, librarians will likely work with offices of graduate studies and designated undergraduate program directors. This may require the utilization of a memorandum of understanding between the student authors or a form in which the student signs off on to allow the deposit of material into the repository. These documents are collaborative effort between all the participating groups. It is worthwhile to have students note their expectations for the preservation and continuation of the hosting of content. Lastly, when working with faculty depositing content into a local repository, whether it is preprint resources or other open access content ,it is valuable to have a memorandum of understanding outlining the intent for preservation and maintenance of the content. There have been instances where a faculty member moving from one institution to another asks to take their deposited scholarship with them. It is helpful to work with faculty either through their departments or through various faculty groups to develop a local practice or agreement that is consistent for all deposited content.
2.6 Recording Administrative Metadata
The final stage of this section is recording all needed administrative metadata where it can be readily retrieved for future reference and use. Librarians chose to record this information through various mechanisms. Some librarians chose to create licensing databases, internal web portals, or shared network drives that run outside of current library information systems. For smaller institutions, the information can be recorded in financial management systems. Some larger library information systems allow for the upload and description major terms of license agreements. The terms can remain within the staff portal or displayed publicly to allow end-users to fully understand any limitations that exist with a given resource. In the case of repository content, the administrative metadata will include the use of a specific Creative Commons license or internal coding which indicates the memorandum of understanding agreed to with the deposit of the material.
Regardless of where the metadata is stored for retrieval, it is important to try to be consistent with the administrative metadata captured. Using one of the checklists created for the licensing/procurement process, determine which criteria is most likely to be needed in the future. This can include the conditions that align to the deal breakers, the different offices or parties who signed off on an agreement, or all the documentation of the license agreement and procurement process. It is also possible to create an administrative metadata template to outline the information to record. Lastly, communicate where data is stored through an outline or workflow document. Questions will arise about purchase decisions and licenses signed. Making it easy for other library personnel and campus parties to readily find this information works to everyone’s advantage.
Basic Resources
In the case of basic resources, the administrative metadata is likely to be quite simple. This can potentially be recorded readily in the library information system or campus accounting system through noting the resource purchased, the party paid for the resource, the amount paid, along with a note as to the license agreement used. There is likely not to be substantial information accompanying the purchase of basic resources. A few things to consider noting with basic resources are: contact information for troubleshooting access issues, contact information for resolving order/payment problems, and any specific platform or hosting body information. For resources purchased and licensed through a consortia, indicating how to access documentation held by the consortium becomes important.
Complex Resources
With complex resources, the amount of administrative metadata grows. For package purchases, it is important to note where title lists of the content are found and any expected changes to the content base when possible. When using an evidence based purchasing plan, make notation of the final amount spent and the anticipated purchased title base volume. If an agreement is a multi-year license and gives the anticipated inflation rate for each following year, capturing this information in the local accounting system is wise as it helps to project what costs may be from one year to the next. For resources that required a Tender or RFP, capture/scan all the pertinent documentation outlining comparison to other products and resources considered. If there were particular deal breakers that ended up being unsuccessfully negotiated, it is good to note why the choices were made to make exceptions and purchase anyway.
If the purchase of a resource occurs in partnership with other areas at your institution, indicate if there is information held by those departments and whom to contact to obtain needed documentation. Record all information that appears relevant to the establishing access and for future management of the content. It is important to recognize that not all future information needs can be anticipated. Therefore, capturing as much information about the purchase decision and the license agreement for the purchase becomes key.
Open Access
For material added to the local institutional repository (IR), noting the level of creative commons license used is essential. In addition, any other terms regarding the deposit of materials to the repository should be made apparent. when utilizing memorandum of understanding about deposits, there may be aspects about these agreement that can be captured on the staff side of the IR system and not made public. This may include arranged embargo periods, notation of content that cannot be shared readily, or any withdrawal policy in place.
When off-setting agreements are utilized, noting what the terms of the off-set agreement is for the reduction of APCs or the reduction of subscriptions should be readily noted within the library management system or campus financial system. The promotion of these terms also occurs through the library website or in direct communications to those who can take advantage of these funds.
Abbreviated References:
Lawson, S. (2015). Total cost of ownership’ of scholarly communication: managing subscription and APC payments together. Learned Publishing, 28(1), 9-13. https://doi.org/10.1087/20150103
Geschuhn, K., & Stone, G. (2017). It’s the workflows, stupid! What is required to make ‘offsetting’ work for the open access transition. Insights, 30(3), 103–114.http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.391
Principles for Offset Agreements. Jisc. https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Global/News%20files%20and%20docs/Principles-for-offset-agreements.pdf (accessed 28 September 2017)
Earney, L (2017). Offsetting and its discontents: challenges and opportunities of open access offsetting agreements. Insights 30(1): 11–24, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.345 (accessed 28 September 2017).
Earney, L. (2018). National licence negotiations advancing the open access transition – a view from the UK. Insights, 31, 11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.412
Lawson, S (2016). Report on offset agreements: evaluating current Jisc Collections deals In: London: Jisc, DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3985353.v1 Year 1 – evaluating 2015 deals, (accessed 28 September 2017).
Lawson, S (2017). Report on offset agreements: evaluating current Jisc Collections deals In: London: Jisc. Year 2 – evaluating 2016 deals, Need URL
Schimmer, R, Geschuhn, K and Voglerm, A (2015). Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access In: München: MPDL, DOI: https://doi.org/10.17617/1.3 A Max Planck Digital Library Open Access Policy White Paper, (accessed 28 September 2017).
ESAC (2016). Joint Understanding of Offsetting. http://esac-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/esac_offsetting_joint_understanding_offsetting.pdf (accessed 28 September 2017).
ESAC (2017). Customer recommendations for article workflows and services for offsetting/open access transformation agreements [first draft]. http://esac-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ESAC_workflow_recommendations_1st_draft20march2017.pdf (accessed 28 September 2017). (June 6, 2018)
Marques, M. (March 6, 2017) Springer Compact agreement: first year evaluation: https://scholarlycommunications.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2017/03/06/compact-agreement-first-year-evaluation/
BIBSAM. (2018) Evaluation of offset agreements – report 3: Springer Compact: http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/files/2018/02/Evaluation_of_offset_agreements_SC_Report_3.pdf
Wellcome Trust. (March 5, 2018) Wellcome is going to review its open access policy: https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/wellcome-going-review-its-open-access-policy
Sweeney, D. (June 14, 2018) Open access – are we almost there for REF? https://wonkhe.com/blogs/open-access-are-we-almost-there-for-ref/
Nicholson, C. (2018) EU set to snub hybrid open-access journals: https://www.researchresearch.com/news/article/?articleId=1375694
Rieck, K. (n.d.) Open Access Policy for FWF-funded projects: https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/research-funding/open-access-policy/