Frederick J. Friend, Director Scholarly Communication, University College London, f.friend@ucl.ac.uk

Abstract

Regular discussion among librarians has led to a realisation of the common problems they face in dealing with price rises and one common solution in the formation of consortia to negotiate for the purchase of books and journals. In the UK the traditional library organisations - SCONUL, CURL, and the regional groupings of libraries - have not taken on this role because of the time-commitment required for successful negotiation but they have supported the formation of new organisations for consortial purchasing. The key organisation for the purchase of electronic resources in the UK is JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee. Working through various agencies, JISC has sponsored the purchase of a wide variety of electronic resources. The latest JISC initiative is NESLI, the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative, which aims to make the full-text of academic journals available to as many UK university libraries as wish to purchase those journals at a discount. The Managing Agent appointed by JISC is negotiating with publishers to achieve good deals to be offered to libraries. Publishers as well as libraries could benefit from this national negotiation in respect of savings in marketing and negotiation, as well as from wider access to their products. Negotiation of purchasing deals at a national level is not easy but the right organisations now exist in the UK to achieve good value for libraries in their purchase of electronic publications.

Librarians are gregarious creatures. Their public image is of being introverted, but there can be few other professions as well organised. Meetings and conferences of librarians abound. And the commitment of librarians to meeting their colleagues is so strong that they will often pay the cost of a meeting from their own pockets, as most of them work for public bodies with limited funds available for travel. In the second half of the 20th century the opportunities for travel have increased out of all recognition by earlier generations, and librarians have not been slow to take advantage of the new opportunities. The availability of e-mail and the explosion in its growth has also provided a means whereby librarians can keep in contact on a regular basis. And the result of all this contact has been that librarians have realised that they have more situations in common than they ever expected, more common problems and more common solutions. Amongst those common problems has been the rising cost of publications they wish to purchase for their users, and amongst the common solutions to that problem has been the formation of consortia of libraries to purchase books and journals at favourable prices. The formation of consortia has given librarians what in the UK we have described as "clout", perhaps a term with too strong an association with violence, but one which describes in a blunt Anglo-Saxon way the strength which few libraries can exercise individually but which all libraries can exercise collectively.

The way in which we have been approaching the collective purchase of books and journals in the UK has largely been by creating new organisations with the support of the long-standing library organisations. For university libraries the key organisation for many years has been the Standing Conference of National and University Libraries, SCONUL, which was founded in 1950, and has in membership all university libraries in the United Kingdom and in the Republic of Ireland, as well as the national libraries in the UK. SCONUL has a very wide brief and it carries out that brief with a very small staff. Its role - although not its membership criteria - is not dissimilar to the role of the Association of Research Libraries in the US. One of SCONUL's standing committees is charged with advising the membership on developments in scholarly communication, and it is that committee which has supported international initiatives to secure better value for libraries from their purchase of books and journals. But SCONUL has not attempted to negotiate purchasing deals on behalf of its members. That has been a deliberate policy, due to the scale of the organisation You cannot do everything with a small staff, and SCONUL has a very broad remit already without taking on a negotiating function for the purchase of publications.

The very broad remit of SCONUL explains the existence of CURL, the Consortium of University Research Libraries. CURL was formed in 1983 specifically to act on behalf of the major research libraries, all of which are in membership of SCONUL but which have particular priorities difficult to meet within the general remit of SCONUL. The two organisations coexist happily, but the fact that the major research libraries found it necessary to form CURL does illustrate the importance for any consortium of matching its activities to the needs of its membership. It is CURL rather than SCONUL which has come closest to negotiating deals for access to electronic information. Through the CURL libraries' membership of the Research Libraries Group the major UK research libraries have access to the RLG databases, and CURL also negotiated a consortium deal with OCLC. But CURL, like SCONUL, is a very small organisation and does not have the staff to negotiate many such deals. Those deals which it has negotiated have had to be core to the mission of all of its libraries. CURL's mission has certainly been changed by the electronic revolution that is affecting all library organisations, but not in the direction of negotiating deals. Rather CURL is concentrating upon policy issues which are particularly important for the future of research libraries, such as digital preservation. In principle both CURL and SCONUL could have developed into purchasing consortia, but in practice they have chosen not to do so.

SCONUL and CURL are the two major organisations which link academic libraries in a national basis in the UK, but there are several regional consortia which play a valuable role, complementing the roles of the national organisations Within London we have the M25 Consortium, which links academic libraries within the M25 orbital motorway. Manchester has CALIM, the Consortium of Academic Libraries in Manchester. The Scottish university libraries have also formed a consortium, SCURL, which has put some effort into the development of purchasing initiatives. And there are a number of others, all of which have made some tentative moves in the direction of consortial purchasing. For local consortia in the UK arranging mutual access arrangements for staff and students of universities has been a more cost-effective form of co-operation than negotiating purchasing deals, but regional consortia have had success in negotiating discounts with subscription agents for traditional paper subscriptions. This has been cost-effective because of the value of the business placed with the major subscription agents, a single negotiation producing a worthwhile discount. This regional approach has had difficulty, however, with consortial deals involving a large number of suppliers, such as the purchase of electronic text direct from several publishers. In that type of negotiation the time-commitment from local library staff has been high in relation to the benefit gained from any single deal.

The existence of the various library co-operative organisations in the UK illustrates one principle about library consortia, i.e. that a successful consortium has to have clear goals, a coherent membership and a structure which matches its goals and membership. The national and regional library organisations in the UK have those three complementary qualities, and they have realised that it is difficult to match time-intensive consortial purchasing with those qualities. Time-intensive consortial purchasing can distort the goals of an existing organisation, create tensions among its membership, and dominate its structure. That is not to say that some existing library organisations in other parts of the world have not been able to adapt successfully and add a consortial purchasing role, but the implications for any organisation are not to be taken lightly. The major US consortia have faced this kind of problem, and although some have coped with it successfully, the small size of UK library organisations by comparison with their US counterparts has made the US approach to consortial purchasing difficult to apply in the UK. Our goals are often the same as those of our US colleagues, but we have had to find our own way of achieving those goals.

Instead of using existing organisations, in the UK we have focussed our interest in consortial purchasing through new organisations set up specifically for that purpose. Very often those new organisations have had a broader remit than library purchasing alone, but that has had the benefit of bringing new skills into the library purchasing process. For the purchase of books and journals on paper libraries have sometimes used the services of purchasing organisations set up by groups of universities in the UK, and these organisations have used their experience in purchasing university equipment and consumables to benefit libraries. But a different type of organisation has become crucial to the successful purchasing of electronic materials. This is new wine, and we have had to make a new bottle to contain it. This key organisation is JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee, set up by the four UK Higher Education Funding Councils to promote the development of electronic information in UK universities. JISC's remit is wider than academic libraries. It also has responsibility for the academic network and other research and teaching initiatives which are computer-based. But JISC has always had the development of electronic library resources as one of its main initiatives and has used a variety of agencies, such as CHEST or Manchester Computing, to achieve its objectives. In the UK the purchasing of electronic library resources is not handled by one organisation but by several, each having its own speciality, but if there is one organisation which plays a key role it is JISC. The role of JISC is not so much as a purchasing agent itself, although it does negotiate deals, such as the deal for UK access to JSTOR, but rather the role of JISC is to facilitate negotiation through a variety of agencies, sometimes offering pump-priming money if it feels that a deal is particularly important. This co-ordinating role is handled by JISC through a range of committees, notably in the library area the Committee on Electronic Information and its Content Working Group. Librarians play a major role in these committees and yet as part of a broader organisation they are able to secure academic support. Another advantage of the co-ordinating role of JISC is that policy on national purchasing deals for libraries can be related to the JISC eLib programme and to the academic initiatives which JISC supports.

The most recent JISC-sponsored initiative is the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative, NESLI. This initiative has the ambitious aim of arranging for electronic access for all UK university students and staff to thousands of journals published by hundreds of publishers. This programme is a development of the Pilot Site Licence Initiative, PSLI, which was set up by the UK Higher Education Funding Councils to secure lower prices for university libraries in their purchase of traditional journals. PSLI achieved its objective with the three participating publishers, but only at the cost of a large subsidy from the Funding Councils. This subsidy could not be continued on a long-term basis, and JISC was asked to consider a framework for achieving cost-reductions for UK university libraries without the subsidy. The framework which JISC has set up is to appoint a Managing Agent for NESLI. The role of the Managing Agent is to negotiate deals for electronic versions of academic journals and to manage the service which will give access to all staff and students at UK universities. The Steering Group set up by JISC to oversee NESLI specified the requirements necessary to run such a service and invited tenders from organisations to act as Managing Agent. The successful bid was from a consortium formed between Swets and Zeitlinger and the University of Manchester Computing Service. Swets have the negotiating experience and the subscription management experience that is required, while Manchester Computing have the experience of offering other services, such as JSTOR, to the academic community on behalf of JISC. The Steering Group feel very comfortable with this combination of commercial and academic expertise. Since the appointment of the Managing Agent in April last year, a great deal of work has been done in negotiating with dozens of publishers. The Steering Group has also continued to be very busy, agreeing a licence which will be used as a standard licence for access to journals through the NESLI scheme. The Steering Group has commented on the terms of deals negotiated by the Managing Agent before they are offered to the community at large. In this way the Steering Group acts a sounding-board to see if a deal is likely to be acceptable to the library community. As NESLI is intended to be a large-scale initiative it was felt that the Steering Group could not handle all the negotiations itself, but we have been in close touch with the Managing Agent as the negotiations have proceeded.

The hope of JISC is that NESLI will create a "win-win" situation for publishers, librarians and academic users. For publishers there will be the advantage of a single negotiating and payment point for all UK academic subscriptions, an advantage which can be measured in hard cash. Publishers will also gain wider exposure for their products within UK universities, breaking away from the current spiral of cancellations. Libraries will gain from lower prices through the strength of the national negotiation, and end-users will gain from access to more journals, rather than seeing their favourite journal cancelled. Publishers are showing a great deal of interest in NESLI and they are offering small discounts but not many on a scale you would expect from a national deal. The Steering Group is relaxed about this situation. It has always thought that NESLI would take up to three years to reach full fruition, and we shall be satisfied if we can get a few good deals off the ground in the first year. There is no doubt that scholarly communication is changing fast, and unless commercial publishers react positively to consortium negotiations they will lose a large share of the scholarly communication market. The changes provide them with both opportunities and threats. I regard NESLI as an opportunity for publishers to increase the readership of their journals in a straightforward way but that will only happen if they agree to fair prices and fair licensing terms. Librarians in the UK actively support the good licensing principles set out by ICOLC, and we also support initiatives like SPARC and NEAR which libraries in the US are promoting to provide an alternative should publishers not agree to good licensing terms for existing journals.

To summarise, therefore, purchasing by consortia has become a very important feature of the UK academic library scene. The traditional library organisations have supported these developments, although we have found it necessary to create new agencies with the expertise and resources necessary to undertake the complicated negotiations. We have also benefited from the existence of a high-quality computer network in the UK and from the interest of the funding councils in the development of electronic information. Even with all these advantages we are still finding that negotiating purchases for library consortia is not an easy process. We have had some notable successes, such as the BIDS service for access to the ISI databases, but we have yet to achieve real success in respect of electronic journals which are published commercially. There is no doubt, however, that consortial purchasing is worth the effort. To end on a positive note, if I look back at how much has been achieved through consortial purchasing arrangements in the UK in just 10 years, there is no reason why the next ten years should not see the availability of consortial deals for access to all electronic publications. I do feel that we have the structures in place to achieve that goal.

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