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STRAIT to the future8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians Conference Sustainable development? E-journals, TOCs, licensing and pricing in health publishing
Cheryl Hamill Keywords: Electronic journals, Publishing, Licensing AbstractPublishers have responded to the opportunities presented by electronic publication and distribution of health information resources in a bewildering variety of ways. Licensing and pricing policies are complex. The paper describes the variety of options that confront librarians and the implications for practice. The ability of librarians to deliver the seamless access to electronic resources expected by their clients is hampered by this complexity, and new skills and systems of service delivery are needed. Specific issues to be addressed include: electronic publication trends (the emergence of TOCs, the number and range of biomedical titles available in electronic only format or in a mixed electronic/print format); the e-journal peer review process; changes in the nature and content of e-journals; gateway services to e-journals; licensing issues, including definitional matters related to site/institutional licenses and associated pricing policies and authentication systems; e-document delivery; new skills needed by librarians in delivering these services; changes in service planning needed to respond effectively; access to e-journals via hypertext links from web catalogues and intranets. IntroductionThe paper is in seven sections: trends in electronic journal publication; costs and pricing of electronic journals; licensing of electronic journals; accessing electronic journals; responses from librarians to the challenge; a consideration of what this all means for clients; and a conclusion. Electronic journal publication trendsElectronic publishing is stimulating a major shake up to the traditional journal publication market and inducing changes in the relationship of publishers with authors, individual readers, and libraries. The entire field is in such a state of flux that it is difficult to keep up with developments, or to determine the best means of setting up access for clients. The paper will focus on scientific, technical, medical (STM) publishing. The turmoil invoked by the potential of new means of electronic delivery of information resources has led to an intense period of examination of the nature of all aspects of STM publishing. Some have called for free internet access to traditional journals and others agitate to reclaim intellectual property rights signed away to commercial publishers by authors whose work is paid for by universities, research institutes, and government agencies.[1] [2] [3] Tensions between notions of information as a commodity and information as a public good also arise where distribution costs are reduced in an electronic environment. The costs, price, and value of journals to authors, publishers, libraries, subscribers, and funders have all come under close scrutiny. Announcements of the death of the printed journal in its present form have been around for some time and have more credibility than similar statements made in the first flush of excitement over microfiche. Most writers now concede that print will perhaps flourish even if only as an output from an electronic edition. It is the potential of electronic journals to value add with hypertext linking both within the text and beyond to associated references, peer reviewed comments, graphs, tables, videos, and raw data from studies, which distinguishes this publishing revolution from those which never realised their promise.[4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Current publication formats include journals available in paper only, paper with CD-ROM and/or online versions and/or electronic tables of contents, or online only. The most recent development has come from the US National Institutes of Health which is considering the creation of an electronic e-print repository of individual biology articles called E-biomed.[9] This is article-by-article publishing rather than a bundling of content under the masthead of a single journal and is similar to the first such development in STM publishing, the e-print archives for physics and astronomy at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The E-biomed proposal however, is not to completely supplant print journals with the electronic repository, but to have articles submitted either to editorial boards or direct to a general repository. The editorial boards could be identical to those of existing print journals, or composed of members of scientific societies or other groups approved by the E-biomed Governing Board. Articles accepted by an editorial board would then appear listed in a print table of contents. The proposal provides a means to link the print literature with a much larger body of electronic content and indeed suggests that there may be more print journals guiding readers to E-biomed content. The content of both repositories would be completely searchable by a single search engine. The proposal is for there to be electronic alerting of relevant items added to the repository according to profiles registered.[10] If this proposal is taken up with enthusiasm, it will fundamentally change the nature of biomedical article publishing. Many publishers already offer free e-mail delivery of the tables of contents for their journals as they are published. Examples of these include: Elsevier's Contents Direct service which covers journals and books published by Elsevier, Pergamon, North Holland and Excerpta Medica;[11] Oxford University Press' TOC service; [12] and Springer's Link Service. [13] Companies such as ISA with ISAscan, [14] Swets with SwetsNet, [15] and Ebsco with Ebsco Alert [16] offer for a fee, a single point of access to register for electronic delivery of tables of contents from thousands of journals. The problem with electronic delivery of tables of contents is that the print journals are often not available for many months in Australia. This leads to disappointment for clients and more pressure for fast-track supply on an article by article basis. Printed journals which reproduce their content on the web do so in a variety of formats. Some content is in HTML [hypertext mark-up language], some in PDF [portable document format], and some in both. The electronic equivalent of printed journals sometimes consists of an exact mirror of the contents of the printed journal, but occasionally reproduces only the articles, leaving out news items, book reviews and the like. The journal Pediatrics publishes tables of contents in the print journal referring to articles which are available online only, and publishes online supplements which are not referred to at all in the print journal. The number of titles available in electronic form is difficult to track but most major publishers now have electronic equivalents to their print titles, though the number of purely electronic STM titles is still relatively small. As an aside, the Journal of Combinatorics, a free electronic journal, has spawned a subscription based print edition. The Association of Research Libraries maintains a directory of electronic journals, newsletters and academic discussion lists. At the time of writing the 7th edition, 1997 was still the most recent available.[17] The delay with the 8th edition may well be that the changes are happening too quickly to document, a purely speculative notion, but one that would not surprise if it was found to be the case. Various directories to the available titles have been compiled and made available on the internet.[18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] Some of these are directories that point to yet other directories. As with much of the STM literature itself, information overload and the difficulty of locating a specific piece of information, such as a journal's web address, can be a problem. Costs and pricing of e-journalsThe 'serials crisis' has become an ongoing state with the various players in the market responding in a variety of ways. Publishers have merged, libraries have consolidated purchasing power into consortia, individual titles have merged, splintered, been dropped, expanded. Electronic journals have further complicated the costing and pricing of such information. The STM publishing market is still largely print based with electronic equivalents. The various elements in the costs of production include: editing; design; printing; distribution; warehousing; administration; marketing; and peer review (administrative costs only, the actual peer review is usually provided free by experts in the field). Content in STM publishing is largely free, or indeed a source of revenue to publishers, and not a cost. Publishers who produce both print and electronic editions of a journal have some duplication of costs in that they must produce both the print and electronic editions. Savings cannot be expected in the production costs of e-journals unless the print editions are dropped, or unless enough additional revenue is gained to cover costs. The only avoidable costs in production of online only journals are those of printing, distribution, and warehousing which various authors place at 20 to 30% of total costs. Other costs are fixed regardless of the means of production and distribution. The costs of production are only one element in the pricing of STM journals of course. Profit margins of publishers and differential pricing for libraries, individuals, and those who are members or students with association publishers are also factors. Publishers' profit margins and the impact of recent mergers of publishers on journal prices, are discussed in more detail by Wyly and McCabe.[31] [32] STM publishing is profitable for publishers and the costs of subscriptions have certainly exceeded all other indexes of price rises for other goods. There is some debate on where the blame lies for the predicament we now face. Mobley rejects arguments that the serial crisis is solely a library problem and points to the role of the scientific associations as creators and consumers of STM journals.[33] The crisis with print journals for libraries is minor compared with the shake up Odlyzko predicts for libraries in the transition to electronic publishing.[34] His fundamental critique is that library infrastructure costs are too inflated to survive the challenge by those seeking to 'disintermediate' libraries and librarians from the information supply chain from publishers/authors to readers. "The high internal costs of libraries come from the need to provide information about, and easy access to, the huge collections of materials that are used infrequently at any single place."[35] These high internal costs he puts at half to three quarters of all library costs (depending on which costs are added into the figures), leaving only a half to a quarter for acquisitions. Odlyzko makes a very useful observation on the costs of information: "The basic problem with information goods is that marginal costs are negligible. Therefore pricing according to costs is not viable, and it is necessary to price according to value. ... we will see much greater use of methods such as bundling, differential quality, and differential pricing."[36] We can already see such models emerging. Pricing of, and rights of access to, electronic journals are very complex issues. Some publishers allow free access to online journals so long as a print subscription is maintained. HireWire Marketing Group[37] offers six levels of pricing: print only, online only, print plus online (bundled), and three levels of discount for online only subscriptions which are dependent on the number of online subscriptions held (effectively a discount price if a bundle of titles is purchased). Some publishers prefer to bundle all of their titles into a single package and sell the package as an item whether or not libraries want all of the titles in the package. Companies such as OVID bundle and value-add by making all of the text of journal articles searchable, linked to Medline citations, and linked from cited references to other full text articles and to Medline citations. One response of libraries faced with shrinking budgets and increased demand, has been to move to purchasing on-request article-by-article from document delivery services as well as from traditional inter-library copying suppliers. There has been a proliferation of these services and some experimentation with giving clients rights to order from services directly rather than making requests via the library. The prices of such services have dropped with the growth in demand. Some offer a one-stop-shop service where the work of locating an appropriate source is outsourced to the agent. Licensing of e-journalsLicensing is as complex as costing and pricing of e-journals, so much so, that the US Special Libraries Association offers web pages with the promising title of De-Mystifying the Licensing of Electronic Resources.[38] Certainly licensing is one of the three key roles that Odlyzko predicts will remain for librarians once we have been disintermediated from our role as custodians of the information collection in its print incarnation.[39] (The other two roles are in reference and enforcing access restrictions.) He also points out that there will be competition for these roles from information specialists. Licensing is in a state of flux as publishers try to anticipate the effects of their licensing arrangements on revenue. Rights of access for libraries vary from allowing access free of charge to all computers in the building where the print copy is normally shelved, to allowing access to all computers within an institution's site, to recognition of access for all bona fide members of a consortium of libraries regardless of the means of connection to the online journal. The definition of 'site' varies with different publishers. Other useful web information exists for those wanting more detail on licensing issues.[40] The Yale University site includes freeware software, The LibLicense Guide to Digital Licensing. This is a "software program designed to assist in the drafting and negotiating of license agreements (also called "contracts") for digital information. The software will guide the user through the major clauses commonly encountered during the negotiation of licensing agreements. Based on information supplied by the user, the LibLicense software supports the creation of a draft license agreement. The user will be able to edit this draft in the rich text editor included with the software, or in his or her own word processing program".[41] There are major management challenges in dealing with such a variety of licensing arrangements. The value of trying to manage licenses which offer access only within the same building where the print subscription is housed is hard to perceive unless such access is used simply to back up lost issues or copies at binding. Some license agreements restrict the use of e-journals for the supply of inter-library copy requests. Odlyzko's explanation for this is: "Obtaining a copy of the paper article is slow, cumbersome, and expensive, and this serves to deter wide use of interlibrary loans as substitutes for owning the journal".[42] He also suggests that "copyright litigations of the last two decades have practically no economic value to publishers aside from restricting photocopying and thus maintaining the subscriber base".[43] At least one e-journal provider allows copying for inter-library supply but requires detailed records be kept and submitted on what copying was done for which library. The complexity of dealing with a large number of variable licenses is challenging the journal subscription agents who are coming up with new services to add value to their traditional subscription agent functions. Blackwell's have launched CLIC Here! (Coordinated Licensing Information Collection) as a central point of information on licensing, pricing models, access and ordering details. Ebsco Online offers a similar range of service and no doubt other agents either have or will develop such support resources. Accessing e-journalsPublishers allow access by a variety of means - some only by IP [internet protocol] authentication, some by means of logon identification and passwords, and some by a mixture of IP address recognition with logon passwords. Policing access rights is a management problem for libraries. Access by means of IP authentication alone will restrict access for valid clients who wish to access resources from locations outside of institutions' IP network. Giving out logon identification and passwords leads to the possibility that these may be shared around beyond the valid client base. Licence and access issues will very gradually transform the role of librarians from custodians of collections to custodians of information gateways. Responses from librarians to the challengesThe most obvious response has been the development of consortia arrangements. Consortia groupings share some of the management work involved in the licensing and access controls and make the bundling of titles offered by publishers more affordable across a wider base. Odlyzko notes that: "Bundling, site licensing, and consortium pricing are all strategies that enable publishers to increase their revenues by averaging out the different valuations that separate readers or libraries place on articles or journals. Many librarians regard consortia as advantageous because they supposedly provide greater bargaining power and thus lower prices. However, they are more likely to be helpful to publishers in maximizing their revenues."[44] This is due to the low marginal cost of providing electronic information, which means that for a small extra amount on the purchase price for one library other libraries might be induced to spend money to gain access to resources they would otherwise have foregone as too expensive. The number of consortia has grown rapidly to the point where there is now an International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC). This is a group of 79 consortia in the US, Australia, UK, Germany, Netherlands and other countries.[45] The most recent Australian collaborative project is JANUS, named after the Roman god of gateways. JANUS is "the result of an initiative of the National Scholarly Communications Forum (NSCF), and brings together the AVCC, the Academies, the CSIRO, the National Library, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), and the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT). The project envisages the establishment of a set of collaborative information centres - Janus Centres - which either through central physical collection or by electronic co-ordination of resources would minimise the need for duplication of publications. The Government has agreed to fund an amount of $455,000 from the Higher Education Innovation Program (HEIP) to develop a business model for an integrated, collaborative approach to research collections and information and to conduct a pilot phase to test the concept in three disciplines (agriculture, chemistry and philosophy). The AVCC is to manage the funds on behalf of the other groups associated with the NSCF."[46] A UK grouping with some of the same objectives is called NESLI - the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative.[47] In the UK, the National Electronic Library for Health in under construction.[48] In New South Wales, the Department of Health has the Clinical Information Access Project (CIAP) which arranges access to electronic resources for clinicians across the state.[49] Finally in Western Australia, a project is underway with similar objectives to CIAP called CHEK-UP (Clinical Health Evidence and Knowledge - Useful for Practitioners). There are numerous other examples. Along with the development of library consortia and coalitions, there is also a challenge to the supremacy of the publishing firms from SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. SPARC's aim is to support increased competition in scientific journal publishing by means of developing "partnerships" with publishers who are developing high quality, economical alternatives to existing high-priced publications. "SPARC is influencing the marketplace positively by encouraging publishers to enter markets where the prices are highest and competition is needed most - primarily in the science, technical, and medical areas. Through its activities, SPARC reduces the risk to publisher-partners of entering the marketplace while providing faculty with prestigious and responsive alternatives to current publishing vehicles. To accomplish this, SPARC: solicits and encourages the introduction of new publications of high quality and fair price; guarantees a subscription base and market new products to potential subscribers; provides start-up capital (in selected cases); generates support for SPARC projects from distinguished faculty, educational organizations, professional societies, and scholarly publishers."[50] In February 1999, the Medical Library Association and the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries joined SPARC. It is too early to judge what influence SPARC will be able to wield, but publishers are unlikely to walk away from the competition, and authors and readers will have to be wooed away from the traditional known titles to new untested ones. Mobley discovered resistance from Faculty at her university when she proposed payment into SPARC on the ground that they would rather have subscriptions to journals they already were familiar with rather than new ones.[51] What does it mean for clientsClients understandably expect seamless and rapid delivery of electronic publications with links from bibliographic citations to full text. They expect no technical hitches and for access paths and licensing issues to be smoothed before them. In most environments, they do not expect to have to pay for information, and this is why consortia arrangements will become even more important in establishing the conditions under which seamless access can become a reality. Odlyzko expects bundling and site licensing to dominate. "There are likely to be 'pay-per-view' options, but they will probably be of marginal importance, just for dealing with demand from those who do not fit into the large classes covered by some subscription or site-license model. A major reason for this is 'sticker shock'.[51] Most clients have not come to grips with the real cost of gaining access to an article. Technical support with information that comes in a variety of formats will also be critical for client acceptance and support as will the reduction of complexity in the process of discovering the information they need. If you build it they will come. ConclusionTo conclude with the question in the title, is the development sustainable in the new information ecology? The optimists (and I am one) say yes, because there is no choice but to evolve or become extinct. However, we cannot move into this altered ecological environment with old skills and attitudes. Fundamentally we have always been concerned to smooth the path of access to resources, and that is unchanged. We do need new skills as guardians and developers of the gateways, and as educators to our clients. We need to know how to embed metadata into our web pages to aid later retrieval, how to catalogue virtual resources in our web catalogues, how to negotiate licenses and access to electronic resources, and how to search and retrieve relevant resources for our clients. When we don't know how to do these things, we need to be prepared to learn, change and adapt. AuthorCheryl Hamill, for 15 years, Librarian in Charge, Fremantle Hospital and Health Service, WA. BAppSci (Library Studies), MA (Public Policy) AALIA Endnotes
1 Walker TJ Free internet access to traditional journals. American Scientist 1998; 86(5) [available at http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walker.html ]
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