Re:Permanent Access Policy for Journals changing Publishers

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

There are two possible situations: the publisher has all the rights, or
the publisher is publishing for a third party who has the rights. These
affect all commercial publishers, not just Elsevier; the same problem
often applies to the noncommercial publishers, as there are many
instances where one society publishes for another.

How the first should be handled is easy. The publisher must warrant that
the libraries are buying the permanent rights to access, with a copy in
escrow in case the publisher becomes unable to supply the material. In
this case, if the publisher sells the journal, it will be necessarily be
sold subject to pre-existing rights such as the subscribers' permanent
access. The new publisher can't withdraw that from the earlier
subscribing libraries, because he hasn't bought that right, since the
first publisher has previously sold it to the libraries. (I leave the
legal wording to those who know such matters, but I think my intent is
clear). Some publishers, including Elsevier, are already coming close to
this.

When a society holds the rights, then it's much more difficult. The
publisher cannot sell us what it doesn't own, and shouldn't pretend to.
I think the solution is that the publisher must publish no journals for
which it does not acquire that right. It should either include in the
contract with the society the right to sell permanent access to
subscribers for the part it publishes, or it should not publish the
journal. The society of course could change publishers in the future, or
stop publishing altogether, but when it has published something, that
publisher must be able to sell the permanent rights, with a copy in
escrow in case it becomes unable to supply. (Again, I leave the legal
wording to the knowledgeable.)

As a preliminary step, I call upon publishers to indicate clearly in
their catalogs and contracts the journals for which they do not have
this right. (In such cases, I further suggest that they not charge the
full price, as they are not providing the full service: they're
providing no more than an aggregator would--temporary access with no
guarantee--and should charge about the same price an aggregator would.)

In particular, I challenge each of them to clearly declare what rights
they are selling us for each title. The best present contracts provide
that they are selling us permanent access to what they have the right
to, but they do not tell us which ones.  (I wonder if they always know
themselves?)

This is critical to the success of e-journals, and I can not say this
too strongly. My library was one of the first research libraries to rely
upon electronic-only in many subjects, making the optimistic assumption
that this potential situation would be worked out, and I have been a
strong proponent of this approach.
If this situation is not solved, then I will have been wrong, and no
research library will be able to fulfill its mission without keeping
paper of all important titles.


kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de wrote:

> Dear Mr Menefee,
>
> could you please give an explanation how Elsevier's ScienceDirect
> archival policy works in cases when a journal changes publisher?
>
> E.g., the journal "Scientometrics" was transferred to Kluwer as of vol.
> 47.2000 from Elsevier to Kluwer, fulltext is available now only from
> that date on. ScienceDirect previously carried volumes in fulltext from
> 32.1995 on. However, this seems to be no longer available for
> ScienceDirect Subscribers (only for ScienceDirect OnSite customers who
> transferred the content to their own servers).
>
> Obviously, an archival policy is of limited value if Elsevier does not
> get the rights to keep the archive of individual journals from each
> possible copublisher (in this case Akademiai Kiado). Libraries need to
> have permanent guaranteed access to licensed content in order to be able
> to rely on online only.
>
> I would also like to know if the new E-Choice License includes permanent
> access guarantees (it should as the print backup may no longer be
> available for those customers). Thank you very much in advance for
> commenting on this.
>
> Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library

-- 
David Goodman
Research Librarian and
Biological Science Bibliographer
Princeton University Library
e-mail: dgoodman@princeton.edu