Re: Wiley-Blackwell 2009 Subscription and Licensing

[bernd-christoph.kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de]

On Wiley-Blackwell's websites for Librarians they certainly try
to keep people from getting bored. As a little diversion, they
offer new variations on some classical strategy games, available
to play online free at Wiley Interscience, like Ms Stackman or
StackAttack.

Now they've added another old game, "Can you spot the
difference?" You may play it on the Wiley-Blackwell Online
Content Transition News Website, or right on this listserv.

We had hoped that Wiley-Blackwell would make an honest attempt to
answer the criticism and questions put forward in a recent
posting to this list (Wiley-Blackwell 2009 Journal Sales Models -
Promises and Hidden Agendas*) and possibly use the chance to take
back some of the frightening prospects on allegedly forthcoming
restrictions for former Blackwell Licensees - restrictions until
now communicated only one-to-one to librarians who dared to ask,
restrictions that were in open conflict with what they had
communicated to libraries and consortia administrators just one
month ago.

Instead, they chose to make far reaching last minute changes to
the policy document circulated previously. However, at least the
hidden agenda is now layed open.

Compare previous and present versions of the section "The
Benefits for Wiley-Blackwell Customers" from the Wiley-Blackwell
2009 Journal Sales Models Customer Briefing:

(10.) The Wiley License offers fair terms and conditions

Before:

- Unlimited access with no restrictions on concurrent users nor
the number of sites ...

After:

- Unlimited access with no restrictions on concurrent users

Reference to the removal of restrictions of the former BAL to a
single "site" has been deleted.

(2.) Customers have choice in how they license online access to
Wiley-Blackwell journals:

Before:

- Access Subscribed journals via Core Titles / Core Collection -
convert the library's own list of subscribed titles to online
only and gain predictable price caps by committing to multiple
years.

After:

- Access Subscribed journals via Core Titles / Core Collection -
convert the library's own list of subscribed titles to online
only and gain ***multi- site access and*** predictable price caps
by committing to multiple years.

So now Universities can continue to keep their present
institution wide access to Blackwell titles only if they commit
to a multi-year Core Title deal, in which they presumably have to
bring in their complete Wiley- Blackwell subscription holdings.
You cannot pick and choose with this type of license.

The policy document states now (and seems to imply that this
holds for Pick and Choose Single Title subscriptions, while only
Core title / Core Collection deals allow multi.site access):

- Access is campus-wide within a single site (defined as a
geographically contiguous office building, complex or campus
location)

and the FAQ explains:

What is the definition of a single site?

We define a single site as a geographically contiguous office
building, complex or campus location. It is not a mailing address
and may include more than one library as well as dial-in access
via the licensee's secure network. If you have any questions
regarding your institution's definition, please ask your Account
Manager.

Wiley-Blackwell tells us on the Transition website (also updated
on September 24, 2008) that for former Wiley titles Basic Access
License (BAL) subscriptions with their limited online benefits
are no longer available and they will be offering many more
benefits for customers with an online subscription in 2009;
however, when we look further down at "What other licensing deals
are there for multi-site institutions and library consortia?" to
check the new license agreement, we are advised: "To see a sample
license, go to: Basic Access License (PDF 21k)

Confusion sets in. Didn't they just tell us BALs were no longer
available? We open it and - Surprise! - it's the same old Basic
Access License that was in effect since 2002 , this version
clearly marked "Revised 3/4/2004 9:37 AM". We examine it and
there are no changes: still the old limitation to one concurrent
User per Journal subscription (sec. B. 4), still access and
post-termination access only to material published during the
calendar year, and Wiley reserves the right to disclose
navigational and transactional information in the form of
anonymous, aggregate usage statistics (including "hits" on Wiley
InterScience and the Licensed Electronic Journals)" but does in
no way promise to deliver usage statistics to the library as
Licensee!

May be this is a bad joke played on electronic resources license
administrators? Does Wiley-Blackwell think customers are inclined
to renew any of their subscriptions if a revised license is not
even available for examination? Or worse, that we sign an
outdated license that does not give us any of the new rights
promised?

Site Definition is the same as above, but in addition we are
told: "Wiley may refuse to grant a license to an institution
claiming a range of I.P. addresses that, in Wiley's opinion,
represents more than one campus or office complex."

So you are entirely in the hands of Wiley. Expect the same
trouble that you may have had with getting campuswide access to
Wiley titles on a title-by-title basis (or outright denial to
provide such access) to affect now also all your present
Blackwell holdings, if not for this renewal (because you might
have existing arrangements that are still in effect so that
present terms will be honored, as just reconfirmed by Wiley) then
certainly the year after.

Now Emily Gillingham, Director, Library and Institutional
Marketing Wiley-Blackwell, claims that the restriction to a
single site (as defined by Wiley-Blackwell) "is consistent with
both Wiley and Blackwell's earlier policies." Having served in
the same position at Blackwell previously, she should be well
aware that Blackwell applied a quite different (and less
restrictive) policy here, in principle, and in practice, too.

Concerning the practice, I already know several institutions that
had difficulties with Wiley (or rather failed) to get their
institution accepted as a single site institution, but never with
Blackwell. From what I heard, Blackwell's practice was certainly
much more liberal than Wiley's in this respect.

With respect to principle, we should look into the wording of the
actual license agreements that were in use until now (the
standard versions provided by the publisher, not the possibly
amended individual licenses). We already cited the old Wiley BAL
version - it's exactly the same wording that Wiley-Blackwell now
wants to adopt for all title-by-title (pick & choose) online
subscriptions.

For Blackwell, we had to distinguish between Standard and Premium
access.

>From 2003 on, the Blackwell "Online Information" website carried
a notice that "all institutions subscribing to Blackwell
Publishing print journals are now entitled to STANDARD access to
the online version through Blackwell Synergy. Standard
subscriptions are priced at approximately 90% of the Premium
subscription price."

I order to activate their *free standard online access*
librarians were asked to provide "Your institution's name and
addresses of all the main sites covered by your library." (so
they DID allow access at several sites, e.g. a university in old
Europe that may have several sites scattered over the city in
which it is located, at least as long these are not administered
separately and legally belong to the same institution).

Only from April 2008, after Blackwell had already been acquired
by Wiley, Blackwell added a paragraph (without modifying the rest
I quoted above) that said "Institutions with Standard
subscriptions to Blackwell Publishing journals are required to
abide by the Terms and Conditions outlined in our 'Site License
Agreement for Basic Access to Online Journals'. Please download
this here.

It was a bit strange that the linked license agreement didn't
carry the title just mentioned but was titled "Corporate Site
License Agreement" and was based on the STM/PDR draft sample
license. The language used may have implied a desire to establish
kind of an analogue in terminology to the Wiley Basic Access
License.

Although this license provided a site definition, the above
mentioned terms and conditions for the Standard access just
continued to ask the library to provide name and addresses of all
the main sites covered, so that we may infer that there was no
restriction to a single site implied, they only asked you to list
the sites.

Even if it were implied, the site definition provided was
certainly more generous than the one always used by Wiley. It
read:

(Key definitions:)

1.11 Site(s) The premises and the IP Address(es) of the Licensee
specified in Schedule 1 Part C. Premises which are in different
towns or cities, or premises which are not within six (6) miles
of each other shall be deemed to be different Sites.

For Premium Print + Online subscriptions and Online only
subscriptions that automatically inherited Premium access rights,
at a slightly (5%) lower list price than Standard Subscriptions,
it was a different matter. For these, institutions had to
actually sign the "Blackwell Publishing Site License".

The academic version was based on the license that was originally
developed by librarians and publishers for the UK National
Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI), in another
incarnation also known as the PA/JISC model license, which in
turn became the basis of what was further developed by Cox
Associates and five major subscription agents (Blackwell, Dawson,
EBSCO, Harrassowitz and Swets) into a set of Model standard
licenses for use by publishers, librarians and subscription
agents for electronic resources. In contrast, the Wiley license
does not look like it has been drafted based on similarly broad
input from the community.

The "Blackwell Site License" although it uses the rather generic
term "Site License" in its title, does not include a site
definition. Rather, it makes clear that authorised users include

"Current members of the staff of the Licensee (whether on a
permanent, temporary, contract or visiting basis) and individuals
who are currently studying at the Licensee's institution, who are
permitted to access the Secure Network from within the premises
of the Licensee and from such other places where Authorised Users
work or study, including without limitation halls of residence
and lodgings and homes of Authorised Users, and who have been
issued by the Licensee with a password or other authentication."

Apart from this, it includes access for Walk-in Users, defined as

"Persons who are not Authorised Users but who are registered as
permitted users of the Licensee's library or information service
and who are permitted to access the Secure Network from computer
terminals within the Library Premises, as designated in Schedule
1."

and only for that purpose, the library is asked to provide a list
of Library Premises (not sites) in Schedule 1. No restriction in
the number of sites is implied, neither here or elsewhere.

So it's essentially an institutional license.

For the Blackwell Publishing Collection, on the other hand,
Blackwell did offer "a choice of licensing options for libraries,
multi-site institutions and library consortia wishing to greatly
enhance their serials collections" (cf.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/librarians/collection.asp).
Clearly, the focus is on bundled offers, here.

No site definition is provided here, but certainly it cannot be
more restrictive than that for the Corporate Site License
agreement.

The concept of Site and Multi-Site Institutions is important,
because it may have financial implications (like a premium for
multi-site access, subject to negotiation, taking into account
the institution's specific situation and needs) and determines
the scope of access and resource sharing allowed under a license
agreement. It is certainly misguided to use it as a means to lock
libraries into subscription patterns as they were in the
Gutenberg galaxis, when print subscriptions were the sole means
of distribution.

The IFLA principles simply state that the license should provide
access for geographically remote sites if they are part of the
licensee's organization.

If we look for guidance on the topic of Multi-Site Access
elsewhere we find a statement by Caroline Mackay from Swets* that
Academic Institutions are generally "regarded as one site
regardless of number of campuses".

More explicit and restrictive (but certainly not unreasonably
restrictive) are the generic site and multi-site definitions used
by the American Society for Microbiology for both academic and
nonacademic ionstitutions (similar also ASCE and others), cf.
http://journals.asm.org/subscriptions/sitelicense.shtml

Single Site (academic or non-academic) is a:

o single geographic location; or
o multiple sites within one city that are part of a single
organizational unit administered centrally. Example: Different
campuses of the same university within the same city are
considered an Authorized Single Site.

Multisite (academic or non-academic) is a:

o organization with independently administered multiple locations
within one city; or
o an organization in more than one city, state, or country, with
administration of this license being done centrally on behalf of
all locations. Example: Each campus of the University of Maryland
system is considered to be a different site, and each branch or
office of a pharmaceutical company is considered to be a
different site.

The Royal Society of Chemistry has a provision according to which
"Outlying field stations could also be included in the
Subscriber's Site provided (i) they are wholly owned or run by
the Subscriber and (ii) the number of Authorised Users at the
field station is less than 10% of the number of Authorised Users
at the Subscriber's Site

Anything more restrictive than these examples is hardly
acceptable in an academic institutional context, and the Wiley
BAL is a prime example of an unsuitable und unnecessarily
restrictive license, especially if arbitrary restrictions on ip
address ranges (up to 10 class C networks!) are imposed. In her
reply to this list, Mrs Gillingham has chosen not to address this
question and we have to assume Wiley-Blackwell will continue this
practice as already confirmed to me by our local account manager.

So the old new Wiley-Blackwell policy is much more restrictive
than the previous Blackwell policy, and all the alleged
advantages of having dropped the limitation to one concurrent
user and the provision of usage statistics to every customer that
has an online subscription (all features which Blackwell
Customers already had), are largely irrelevant if you are still
not (or no longer) allowed to network those individual title
subscriptions across the university, if you do not upgrade to a
Core Titel / Core Collection deal.

I conclude that the hidden agenda has become the official course,
and that Wiley-Blackwell - through the denial of university-wide
access to "pick and choose" single-title subscriptions -
continues to use its expanded market power to impose
anticompetitive restrictions on journal sales and the ability of
libraries to select what they need and cancel journals if
necessary.

I certainly concede that multi-year core title deals with price
caps in the long run can bring savings to libraries, but only if
you are in a financial position to enter these contracts in the
first place. Wiley- Blackwell certainly offers enough incentives
to enter such deals or the advantageous consortial deals that
build upon them, but is not acceptable that university libraries
who choose not to do so (e.g., because of budget cuts) are denied
university-wide access to their titles. Also, a library should be
able to decide which titles to bring in as core titles into their
core collection, when they enter a multi-year deal.

For me the only relieve brought about by the message of Emily
Gillingham was that although Wiley-Blackwell will switch over to
base pricing on a single currency for the Americas, Europe, UK,
and the Rest of the World, they will not use it as a means for
increasing prices (exchange rate profiteering, as it is labelled
by Dana Roth) but will base it on fixed recent exchange rates
(June 16, 2008) that will be adapted every year. This is fair and
different from the practices of some other publishers.

Bernd-Christoph Kamper,
Stuttgart University Library and Consortium BW

*) "Moving from print to online - a practical guide",
presentation given at the Seminar From print to pixels - the
future for print based business resources in a digital age, held
at Edinburgh, September 12, 2005, organised by the Scottish
Information Network), presentations online at
http://www.scotinfonet.com/calendar/050912.htm