RE: libraries and licensing of personal database subscriptions

["Shipley, Michele" <Michele_Shipley@URMC.Rochester.edu>]

We are facing a similar situation with a very popular full-text clinical
medicine resource.  The company's main customers are physicians with
personal subscriptions that can be used in offices or homes.  The company
provides institutional subscriptions with remote access but the price is
sky high in order to protect the revenue from personal subscriptions.  
Miner Library has come up with the funds for an onsite institutional
subscription but the remote access subscription is out of our reach.  Our
physicians love the onsite subscription but many also want remote access.
The company offers a discount for groups of personal subscriptions so in
2005 we will be offering physicians who want remote access the opportunity
to sign up for a discounted personal subscription.  Physicians or their
departments will have to pay for the subscription but the library will
collect the money, pay the company's invoice, distribute passwords, etc.  
It will be interesting to see how many physicians will participate.

Miner Library would not support using library funds to purchase personal
subscriptions for some patrons but not others.  The only exception would
be if we received special funding to provide a resource to a particular
group of patrons such as medical students.

Michele Shipley
Assistant Director of Digital and Branch Libraries
Edward G. Miner Library
University of Rochester
601 Elmwood Avenue
Rochester, NY  14642
(585)275-6878
(585)275-4799 (fax)
michele_shipley@urmc.rochester.edu 

-----Original Message-----
From: Liblicense-L Listowner [mailto:liblicen@pantheon.yale.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2004 11:35 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: libraries and licensing of personal database subscriptions

Imagine this situation:

1.  Publisher XXX allows only individual/personal licenses to its
specialized database (these are not journal articles); no institutional
site licenses are permitted.

2.  Individual (a biomed researcher) wants a subscription aka license but
doesn't wish to license and pay for it -- believes the institution (aka
library) should do so.

Question to readers of this list:  What's the appropriate action for the
library to take?  Buy and manage personal licenses (as an appropriate role
for said library); or not (publisher does not want library as customer;
sets precedents that cannot be sustained for other researchers and
resources).

Your thoughts would be welcomed.  Ann Okerson/Yale Library
ann.okerson@yale.edu