RE: Peggy Hoon on licenses

[Tony G Horava <thorava@uottawa.ca>]

Hi Peggy,

I certainly believe that we should be pro-active in asserting our 
own interests by employing our license when negotiating with 
vendors. This is our standard practice for our provincial 
consortium.  We have had a fair amount of success in using our 
model licenses when negotiating consortial agreements for OCUL 
(Ontario Council of University Libraries). You can find our model 
licenses at: 
http://www.ocul.on.ca/licences_info/view.php?dbid=195 Look under 
'Products'

We have a number of agreements with ebook providers, journal 
publishers and others, where our license has been applied, with 
minimal changes negotiated with the publisher. This process has 
kept us in the drivers' seat.  Since we have a local hosting 
infrastructure for both ebooks and ejournals (Scholars Portal - 
over 8,000 full-text journals and 250K ebooks loaded . . . see 
http://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/sp/home) this process 
is essential to our strategy and long-term success, re 
preservation, integration, and access issues. We also integrate 
various services such as link resolution and ILL in our Scholars 
Portal service...it has evolved enormously since inception ten 
years ago. To my knowledge, we have the most evolved and 
comprehensive set of services and collections that are locally 
hosted and managed by a consortium.

Cheers, Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu 
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Hoon, 
Peggy
Sent: February 23, 2011 6:27 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Peggy Hoon on licenses

I think I accidentally sent a partial message, Ann.  What I was 
trying to say, was that I am aware of and applaud the hard work 
and beautiful results of standard licenses that groups have 
developed for the benefit of all.  I use some of the terms myself 
- it's all great. I also applaud the web sites, like yours, and 
the licensing educational efforts by many groups.

Having said that then, my question would be - when your library 
approaches a vendor to buy access to their product, do you send 
them your license and say this is the one we'll be using?  Is 
that what we should be doing?  If so, do the vendors go along 
with that?  Our experience is that we get sent the vendor's 
license which then requires varying amounts (sometimes large 
amounts) of time to realign the terms with our environment and 
what our users need.  I looked at another license yesterday that 
is so off I wonder if it's even the right one for academia.

So - the point isn't that great licenses haven't been developed, 
but they aren't the ones coming across the table.  I would love 
to know if anyone has had success just sending back an entirely 
different license - like NERL - and had IT used as the starting 
point?

Best, Peggy