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Re: EJournal Aggregation 

The trend in recent years is moving strongly in the direction of
publishers refusing to work through third party licensing, or so-called
document delivery, organizations. Instead, they are increasingly insisting
on licensing directly, if at all; alternatively, several larger publishers
are attempting to coordinate their licencing activities. But in both
cases, the conditions tend to be very stringent, in order to protect
revenues equivalent to full year subscriptions for their print medium. The
reason: the same as the reason OCLC wants to protect its subscription
revenues. Without these, the publishers' (or OCLC's)ability to continue
the journals would rapidly disintegrate. I would not expect publishers to
permit joint use by multiple libraries of a given journal. No entity, OCLC
or commercial publishers, want to commit suicide. Alan M. Edelson, Ph.D. 
                                                                         
________________________________________________

Ann Okerson wrote:

> How aggregated is aggregation when, as Paul Gherman writes of OCLC's
> ejournal service:
> 
> >The publishers establishes whatever license agreement they care to with
> >libraries. [and the aggregator offers the actual access]
> 
> The is the model that others are proposing as well.  Now, on the one hand,
> this pleases me because I emphatically feel we NOT have arrived at the
> point where ejournal (or other e-content) licenses are standard and
> acceptable enough for libraries to allow an intermediary/aggregator to
> consolidate the licensing part of the work for us. Also, these aggregators
> are licensees themselves and are not necessarily in the best position to
> represent customers' interests vis a vis license language.  We (libraries)
> can generally get better use terms for ourselves directly than by taking
> what an aggregator offers.
> 
> BUT -- surely one of the largest parts of the effort related to accessing
> econtent is the *licensing* negotiations.  The bind is that aggregators
> currently cannot help us with this matter.  Does anyone see any way out of
> this, or are we (as I believe) in a position of negotiating singly and
> directly an increasing number of licenses each month, while waiting a few
> years for some acceptable practices and language to emerge?  At that
> point, the aggregators could add licenses to their arsenal of services for
> libraries.  The objective of this list and the Liblicense project overall
> is to hasten that day; are there other ways?


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