Re: libraries and licensing of personal database subscriptions

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

Interesting question -

To me, this is a dangerous precedent.

There may be times when it is necessary for libraries to purchase
resources for the exclusive use of one user, or a specific group of users.  
This is because there are situations where the only alternative is no
access to these resources for these users.

However, picture what happens if we begin to purchase medical information
only for the medical faculty and students, business resources exclusively
for business faculty and students, and so forth.

In the short term, an individual may have access to more of the
information they need.  In the long term, everyone ends up with access to
fewer resources.  Interdisciplinary research would become more difficult.  
Faculty would have less intellectual freedom.  The business or law student
or faculty would not have the opportunity to decide for themselves whether
to peruse the biomedical literature, and the biomedical specialist could
end up not having the ability to peruse the business or law information,
should they so desire.

Picture trying to figure out how to diagnose and resolve an environmental
problem in such a situation.  You may need access to literature in
ecology, biology, medicine, law, and social studies.  Access to key
information in these areas may be limited to individuals or small groups
who specialize in these areas.

Accounts tied to particular individuals also have the disadvantage of
privacy concerns.  Individuals are better off with library group accounts
and proxied authentication that does not reveal information about a
particular user to the vendor.

My suggestion is that we need to work with faculty to explain the
implications of these kinds of decisions (and other potential futures,
such as open access, of course; if they've published recently, asking them
to self-archive and consider what this does for access to their article,
as compared to this kind of purchase, could be illuminating).

Talk with the vendor to try to encourage a purchase decision that makes
the resource more widely available - perhaps switch to a one user option
(shared by everyone), rather than a one individual option.

It might be tempting, given budget limitations, to consider purchase for
individuals or subsets of users for economic reasons.  In the long term,
however, this does make economic sense.  It costs more to market to
individuals and smaller groups, and it costs more to authenticate on an
individual than a group level.

Let's look at a hypothetical situation:  a database funded primarily
through library journal subscriptions.  The resource is expensive.  
Libraries would like to lower their prices, and decide they are willing to
purchase for only a subset of their users as a compromise, if necessary.  
Many libraries pursue this option.  The vendor's revenue drops.  The
vendor may have no option but to raise their prices for these subsets of
users - possibily to what the libraries were paying previously for
everyone, or more, because this is a more expensive service to provide.

Compared to this approach, figuring out the economics to make open access
work is easy!

cheers,

Heather Morrison