Embracing Wide Deals (Interconsortial Licensing)
Ann Okerson
Need
• respond to user demand for more journal and e-resource content even as library budgets are severely restrained
• streamline labor-intensive e-content licensing
• create more transparency and consistency in e-resource pricing and terms
Benefit
• leverage the buying power of a large number of libraries
• develop more coordination, efficiency, and transparency with advantageous prices and user terms
There’s really nothing new about library consortia; the oldest go back decades. There’s really nothing new about licensing electronic resources either; again, the first inklings are decades old. But licensing large amounts of what we now cold-bloodedly call content in order to make that content available to users, and doing so through sophisticated consortia led by canny and experienced leaders—that is something we learned to do only in the 1980s and 1990s.
But times are changing rapidly nowadays. An emerging trend that deserves to be noticed, understood, and interpreted is the growth of what I have called the wide deal. Others have called these interconsortial licensing or ICL for short. Wide deal is a play on words, alluding to the everyday phrase the Big Deal. The Big Deal is another invention of the 1990s, referring to the kind of arrangement in which a library or consortium takes a single large package of content from a given publisher for a single price. The Big Deal usually features far more content than that library or those libraries would have subscribed to before, for about the same price. For our purposes here we can leave to the side the arguments about the wisdom and future of the Big Deal. In this case study, I will concentrate on the dimension of magnitude.
A wide deal embraces several or many consortia working together on the behalf of the reader. Such a wide deal can be a big deal (a large package of content) or not (it could focus on a single significant resource). What is different today is the way groups of consortia are growing interested in working together for the benefit of their collective users. The assumption here is that such an interconsortial deal, if it is the shape of things to come, offers a path forward to broadening or universalizing access to particular kinds of resources.
Why would consortia enter into such arrangements? What are the advantages they bring? When wide deals capture a very broad swath of libraries, they can leverage the buying power of a large number of libraries at once. In principle, the more participants there are, the better the deal should be. In times of restricted funding for libraries, that means better financial and use terms, as well as more content for the same spend. As negotiating strategy, it means that publishers may have less opportunity to divide and conquer in a series of one-off deals with individual institutions. These deals are often hedged with nondisclosure requirements.
Wide deals increase the overall effectiveness and efficiency of licensing, using fewer but more experienced people to license the same resources. This concentration of libraries’ buying power and talent can more effectively get the attention of publishers. Dealing wide is an approach that can strengthen a negotiator’s hands sufficiently to be a game changer. Obviously, this kind of arrangement works only when publishers are willing to see the benefits for themselves: efficiency and potential access to many more readers at once.
Librarians and publishers all know why licensing cooperation is important. To succeed now requires more of the following:
• Advocacy: consortia need to make libraries’ needs and capacities understood to publishers and constituents
• Productivity: with more consortia engaged on a given deal, there is the potential for getting more content for a better price with less overhead
• Elevation: better deals can attract more participating libraries to take up the offer, thus benefitting more users and saving more money
• Coordination and synchronization: achieved through working together on common resources at common times, more efficiently, more rapidly, and with better outcomes
The emerging wide deals should have some important common characteristics. First, negotiators must consistently secure the very best arrangement possible. That best is defined as something better than the publisher offered at the outset or that could be achieved by an individual library or consortium. For example, offers can involve sliding pricing that lead to good-better-best results. With such offers, libraries exploit the communications network among consortia to best effect while responding to publisher marketing in a timely way that benefits both sides. Consortial administrative capacities are also exploited to best effect.
These types of cross-consortia deals may be regional, national, or international. Their scope is continually expanding. Starting in the late 1990s, the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) has been the main forum for talking shop and a leader in consortial dealing worldwide.1 In the late 1990s through ICOLC, US consortia achieved a common license for the large aggregated electronic resource Academic Universe.2 That deal is the oldest and the still-standing equivalent of a national site license in the United States. Meanwhile, WALDO in New York, licensing for no fewer than 900 member institutions, brings together individual institutions and consortia and works with dozens of publishers.3 At the same time, LYRASIS has evolved into a powerhouse with over 1,700 member institutions and offers services to many more. LYRASIS includes other consortia among those that it represents. In addition to licensing for its members, it has negotiated with certain publishers for cross-consortia deals.
For example, a video publisher has offered via LYRASIS a multiconsortia arrangement, with ever-larger discounts as the library group grows. The discount tiers they recognize are participants in the following ranges: 2–5, 6–10, 11–30, 31–99, and 100+. Through the work of LYRASIS, there are growing numbers of participants, all benefitting from making it into the penultimate tier. With more time and effort, the 100+ tier is a distinct possibility for the future. This video publisher exemplifies a newer player in the e-publishing market.
Project Muse, a classic in e-journals, has newly come into e-book space. It offered, via LYRASIS/ARL, an introductory e-book deal in fall 2011, with pricing based on global uptake. As of spring 2012, the initial offer morphed into a simpler structure, with tiers of price reductions for large or very large customers. Discussions are fluid and continuing, but it is clear that Project Muse and its library customers will benefit from this scale of conversation.
If LYRASIS was doing previews of coming attractions, it would point to the recently concluded arrangement with Oxford University Press for its OUP Scholarship Online e-books. I predict that discussions will soon bear fruit with several other e-book publishers—all offers with sliding-scale discounts. Several further e-resource deals with potential interconsortial components are under investigation or in process.
There also has been a modest emerging wave of cross-national deals. For example, in a pilot some five years ago, Knowledge Exchange Project (Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, UK) issued multinational tenders for resources.4 The project is dormant but slated to resume in the future, perhaps with a different configuration of nations. Europeans are pursuing other cross-country arrangements at this time.
At the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), we have been piloting cross-national and cross-consortial approaches. We realize that for the best arrangements, even our 270 members are not always enough for the best terms—particularly for specialist resources in which only a small fraction of the large membership will have research interests.5 CRL has started to work with international partners in the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN-Canada), JISC-UK, and with a group of US consortia called CRL-Friends.6 These are groups with overlapping library members. Some of the pilot projects we have worked on include:
• 19th Century Collections Online (NCCO) Gale-Cengage. For the first four modules, we received an aggressive publisher offer of up to 55 percent discount. This arrangement brought together CRL, CRL-Friends, and CRKN in a single negotiation and contract. Their new offer for modules 5–8 includes the Australian and New Zealand consortia. The project has been well received and has attracted the same high level of participation.
• The Churchill Archive (CA) from Bloomsbury UK, a vast collection of materials from the papers of Winston Churchill, brought an offer of up to 30 percent discount, depending on the exact level of uptake achieved. For this resource, CRL worked with CRKN, JISC, and CRL-Friends in a first round.
Both of these projects looked to deliver new products with higher demand and high-quality functionalities. Both publishers were open to cross-consortial arrangements and good licensing terms from the library point of view. Vendor communications have been excellent, and the vendors did a great deal of work to bring the deals together. CRL has also offered a modest number of other wide historical/archival database deals to partners. Of course these are only first fruits and first steps. As interconsortial arrangements move forward, there are some important questions to keep in mind and resolve.
What is the appropriate scale for licensing these projects? At CRL, we look at this question first with respect to the resources being licensed: single resources, subsets of a publisher’s output, or for large swaths of a publisher’s product. Next we need to approach the right sets of users, ranging from CRL’s area programs, to all CRL members, to CRL plus selected partners, and perhaps to CRL with partners in large consortia, overlapping and otherwise.
Larger questions include:
• How do consortia that offer deals not only to their own members but also to other consortia assure and manage member benefits?
• What is the best way to collaborate with partner consortia? That question can be a particular challenge in getting the best offer to be workable across national boundaries.
• Administratively, how to increase capacity for doing the work of contracting for e-resources in a new way?
All who offer wide deals need to pay attention to workflows, to the redirection and rationalization of duties, and to provision of additional support.
We also need to consider what will be the best library payment mechanisms in varying circumstances. For example, when does it make sense to have individual libraries or consortia pay the publisher directly and when does it make sense to aggregate the dollars to a single payer? And a consortium needs to be careful not to undermine its own privilege-of-membership benefits, particularly when the consortium is supported by member dues. In such a case, it will likely be necessary to charge nonmembers a small handling fee or a percentage to pay for services and negotiations.
A final and yet unresolved question for wide deal efforts is how to clarify which group will pursue which e-resources on behalf of the cross-consortial partners. The answer requires an articulated clarity of mission by each consortium so that unnecessary muddle, time-sinks, or inadvertent competition are avoided. Finally, e-resources, especially large databases in support of research, tend to be very costly. Member libraries need sufficient lead time to evaluate such resources, and where they are of interest, libraries need sufficient time to identify and allocate funds for these purchases. Thus cross-consortial wide deal licensing involves thoughtful activities in filling the pipeline, so that each deal offers the best possible advance information and has the greatest chance of uptake. Discussions about these challenges for broad collaboration are in their early stages. Proponents of this type of cooperation believe that experience to date is most promising and that a growing number of libraries—and particularly their students and researchers—will benefit.
Notes
1. The International Coalition of Library Consortia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Coalition_of_Library_Consortia.
2. For a description, see www.lyrasis.org/About-Us.aspx.
3. The Westchester Academic Library Directors Organization, www.waldolib.org/members.asp.
4. Wilma Mossink and Max Vogler, “Knowledge Exchange Multinational Licensing Tender: An Evaluation,” Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community 21 (March 2008): 19–24.
5. For detailed information about the Center and its work, see www.crl.org.
6. Center for Research Libraries, “CRL Working with CRKN, JISC,” www.crl.edu/news/7582.