RE: Peggy Hoon on licenses

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris@sfu.ca>]

BC Electronic Library Network  has developed our own Model 
License (the language may sound familiar as this is based on 
research including examining other model licenses):
http://www.eln.bc.ca/view.php?id=1537

All of our major vendors have signed a version of this license.

As Peggy and others have pointed out, part of the problem is 
vendors not understanding how academic libraries work. For us, 
there is the added complexity of how library consortia work in 
general, and how BC ELN works in particular. To streamline the 
process of how we go about educating vendors who would like to 
begin to work with BC ELN (or expand offerings), we have 
developed a web page specifically outlining the process for 
vendors:
http://www.eln.bc.ca/view.php?id=1597

My personal opinion is that scholarly communication is in a 
process of transition, and that the transition will continue for 
some time. For this reason, although standard licenses and 
initiatives like SERU are most helpful and should be pursued, 
these should be viewed as temporary measures. Any individual 
organization may have unique needs that would require a unique 
model license. Also, not all products or vendors are the same. A 
publisher, for example, can grant blanket rights that may be 
difficult or impossible for an aggregator whose products contain 
resources from many different publishers. The rights to full text 
that we seek may seem strange to a vendor of a citation-
only database.

The best licensing in existence for scholarly communication, 
IMHO, is CC licensing, as this simplifies understanding of how 
materials can be used. CC licenses are used by 
subscriptions-based as well as open access publishers. Of course, 
this does not help when we are licensing resources from vendors / 
publishers who do not use CC licenses. The reason that I bring 
this up is because all of us who work with vendors at any level 
can play a useful role in helping them to understand the current 
and evolving needs of scholarship, so that they can develop 
practices which will help them to survive and thrive into the 
future.

best,

Heather G. Morrison
Project Coordinator
BC Electronic Library Network