Licensing principles, consortia and practical experiences

Abstract

Tilburg University in the Netherlands was the first university in Europe to enter into a license agreement with a publisher. After a year of discussions on technical, organizational and legal issues an agreement was signed between the university and Elsevier Science in December 1993. This agreement covered about 110 Elsevier journals to which the library subscribed. In 1999, Tilburg University Library defined as its goal for the year 2001 to have 50% of its journals available in electronic form and to deliberately move from print to electronic. These goals were set later than expected in 1993. When the first digital library programmes were developed and published in the 1980s, the expectation was that the digital library would solve a lot of the problems libraries were facing in the printed environment. Access would be provided to extensive information sources that would no longer necessarily be stored in the local library. Access would become more important than ownership and would be possible any time, any place. The digital library also promised to play an important role in solving the „journals crisis.” The expectation was that the concept of the digital library would offer an opportunity to provide efficient end-user access to scientific work, and would lead to more cost-effective solutions for access to journals. The question is whether this can be realized and what libraries are actually doing to find these „cost-effective solutions.” The process of moving towards full-text electronic services is fascinating but more complicated than expected. The transitional period is timeconsuming. Many aspects have to be taken into account such as easy access, standardization, authorisation, security, storage and archiving, multiple and personal subsciptions, licensing issues, budgets, and user acceptance. All these organisational, technical, financial, and legal issues have to be considered if a library wants to enter into consortia agreements with respect to the primary information in electronic form.