Electronic Journals: A Selected Resource Guide
(archival resource, no longer maintained)
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Legal and business issues
A major area of concern for libraries and publishers alike is the licensing of e-journals. Licensing, pricing, intellectual property rights management, and access management (the control of user access to online journals) are inextricably bound up, because the price and access restrictions are (or should be) included in the license agreement.
The very idea of a "license" to journal content is a new concept. When libraries bought printed journals, they paid their money and got their paper, which they then owned and bound, archived, sent out for interlibrary loan, placed on reserve, and from which users photocopied single copies of single articles, in accordance with fair use copyright law.
Now, because electronic copy is so easily duplicated and distributed, it has become more important to protect profits by restricting access, and producers of information are requiring "licenses" to content. Publishers and consumers now enter into license agreements that regulate the ways in which the content may be used, and by whom. But it can be difficult to navigate the variety of licenses that are proposed.
Pricing has long been a major issue in the journal marketplace, but it takes on new importance for electronic media because there are no precedents for price models in the online world. Because there are no print costs, the bulk of the publication expense resides in the production of the initial copy of an electronic work and in its storage. Subsequent "copies" are produced at negligible cost, throwing existing print pricing paradigms into confusion.
Libraries and academics have taken matters into their own hands with the formation of SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries, whose stated aims are to "create a more competitive marketplace...; ensure fair use of electronic resources...; and apply technology to improve the process of scholarly communication and to reduce the costs of production and distribution" (from "SPARC: The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition," http://www.arl.org/sparc/), by forging alliances between educational organizations and professional societies. The expected outcome of this initiative is high-quality scholarly journals, both print and electronic, at lower prices than commercial publishers currently offer. One of the projects that SPARC has supported, along with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the University of Kansas, the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium, and Allen Press, is BioOne, an e-journal hosting service for bioscience research journals, which aims to provide electronic access to previously print-only journals at a reasonable price (http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=f40, http://www.bioone.org/bioone/?request=index-html).
http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/statement.html
"Statement of Current Perspective and Preferred Practices for the Selection and Purchase of Electronic Information," by the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC), an informal international organization of about sixty library consortia serving primarily higher education institutions. This is an excellent outline of current issues and a summary of this group's position on preferred practices in the emerging electronic information environment. It contains pointers to a number of statements of principles of individual institutions. This statement appears in print in Information Technology and Libraries, Vol. 17, No. 1 (March, 1998), pp. 45-50. The Coalition's web site contains links to reactions to this statement from a variety of organizations and publishers (http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/)
Licensing
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml
Sponsored by CLIR (the Council on Library and Information Resources) and hosted at Yale University, the LIBLICENSE project is the premier web site for understanding the issues surrounding the licensing process. It provides practical guidance for drafting and negotiating legal documents in general, with particular relevance to electronic information. It also contains the archive for the LIBLICENSE-L discussion list and a Bibliography of Licensing Sources (http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/bibliogr.shtml). A special feature is the freely downloadable LIBLICENSE software, which guides the user through a step-by-step process for creating a license agreement.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september99/okerson/09okerson.html
Okerson, Ann. "The LIBLICENSE Project and How it Grows." D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 9 (September, 1999). A history and description of the project.
http://www.licensingmodels.com/
In the hope of simplifying the plethora of licenses that institutions must deal with when purchasing e-journals, a group of subscription agents has contracted with John Cox Associates to develop and maintain a suite of model licenses designed for the acquisition of electronic journals and other electronic resources. These are intended to help publishers, subscription agents and libraries to create agreements that express what they have negotiated.
http://www.alpsp.org/licensing.htm
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers' licensing page. Includes the ALPSP Guidelines for Licence of Electronic Publications, as well as pointers to other model licenses and licensing initiatives.
Pricing
http://web.mit.edu/waynej/www/robnett.htm
Robnett, Bill. "Online Journal Pricing," in E-Serials: Publishers, Libraries, Users, and Standards, Haworth Press, March 1998. A detailed discussion of various pricing schemes.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june96/06varian.html
Varian, Hal R. "Pricing Electronic Journals," D-Lib Magazine, June 1996. An intriguing idea for pricing e-journals, which is sure to stimulate discussion.
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/varian.html
Varian, Hal R. "The Future of Electronic Journals," Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 4, No. 1 (September, 1998). An analysis of the economics and production issues of e-journals and predictions for the future.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/07hunter.html
Hunter, Karen. "Electronic Journal Publishing," D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1998. The publishers' point of view. Karen Hunter is Senior vice President, Elsevier Science.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june99/06bonn.html
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july99/mackie-mason/07mackie-mason.html
Bonn, Maria S., et al. "A Report on the PEAK Experiment: Context and Design." D-Lib Magazine, June 1998, and MacKie-Mason, Jeffrey K., et al. "A Report on the PEAK Experiment: Usage and Economic Behavior." D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1999. The PEAK Experiment was a research project undertaken by The University of Michigan Library in cooperation with Elsevier Science, to study the consequences of several pricing models on both the consumer and the producer. Further information about the PEAK project may be found at the PEAK website: http://www.lib.umich.edu/retired/peak/
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-01/buckholtz.html
Buckholtz, Alison. "Returning Scientific Publishing to Scientists." The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (August, 2001). A history and overview of the SPARC project.
Intellectual property rights management
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12gladney.html
Gladney, Henry M. "Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property." D-Lib Magazine, December 1999. A synopsis and analysis of the report, released in November, 1999, of the study committee appointed by the U.S. National Academies to consider the impacts that the emerging digital information infrastructure is having on intellectual property rights. The report is entitled The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age.
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-03/gervais.html
Gervais, Daniel J. "Electronic Rights Management and Digital Identifier Systems." Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 4, No. 3 (March, 1999). This in-depth paper explores methods of managing intellectual property rights in the electronic world, particularly the embedding of rights information into a digital identifier, such as the DOI.
http://www.indecs.org/
The INDECS (Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce Systems) project is "An international initiative of rights owners creating metadata standards for e-commerce." Its stated goal is to develop a data model and standards for embedding rights management information into metadata. The project is scheduled to complete in March, 2000.
Academic libraries have raised particular concerns about copyright restrictions on electronic works, because they have always relied on the Fair Use provisions of the copyright act. Publishers have been reluctant to allow electronic versions of materials to be used for InterLibrary Loan, Course Reserves, and electronic course packs.
The University of Texas System Office of General Counsel runs a web site on intellectual property which includes the following pages of interest to electronic journals:
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/confu.htm
Overview of the Conference on Fair Use
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/l-resele.htm
Fair-Use Guidelines for Electronic Reserve Systems
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/illconfu.htm
CONFU Interlibrary Loan Working Group Summary of Discussions held March 27, 1996
The following WWW sites also list pointers to resources on copyright and intellectual property in the digital world:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/
Sponsored by CLR, FindLaw Internet Legal Resources and the Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Copyright/
The copyright section of the University of California, Berkeley, Library's resource page on Digital Libraries.
Access management
Allowing all legitimate users to access electronic journals, while keeping out those who are not authorized, is a legal as well as a technological issue.
http://www.arl.org/newsltr/201/cni.html or http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/cem9842.html
Lynch, Clifford. "Access Management for Networked Information Resources." ARL Newsletter, Issue 201 (December 1998), and CAUSE/EFFECT Vol. 21, No. 4 (1998) . A good primer on the alternatives and issues involved in managing access control, and suggestions for solutions.
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/99-spring/article3.html
Krieb, Dennis. "You Can't Get There from Here: Issues in Remote Access to Electronic Journals for a Health Sciences Library." Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Spring, 1999. A summary of access management issues in a real-life situation.
The role of the subscription agent
As many publishers have started selling their electronic journals directly to consumers, the role of the subscription agent has come under some scrutiny.
http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=g15#6
Bosch, Steve. "Impact of Electronic Aggregations at the University of Arizona." SPARC E-News, December 2000-January 2001. This article examines the negative impact on academic libraries, when publishers insist on dealing directly with their customers.
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-04/knibbe.html
Knibbe, Andrew. "A Subscription Agent's Role in Electronic Publishing." Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 4, No. 4 (June, 1999). An agent enumerates the new services that subscription agents now provide.
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