Electronic journals - trends, direction, experiences

Albert Prior, director, Swets Publisher Services.
Swets Blackwell - NESLI Managing Agent

Agenda

• E-journal trends
• E-journal pricing models
• Subscription agents
• Agents and consortia
• NESLI

E-journal trends

• Constant change - difficult to predict too far ahead
• Migration from print to electronic
  "Within two years, Elsevier Science will be a pure Internet business" Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier Science

From print to electronic

• Elsevier: 35% of its journals subscriber base now takes ScienceDirect. Online sales this year will reach £400m
• Academic: IDEAL taken up by 1600 institutions in 20 countries. Thirty-five percent of its library business now electronic

E-journal trends

• Constant change - difficult to predict too far ahead
• Migration from print to electronic
• Libraries gradually dropping print

Trends:
STM Publishers

• Consolidation amongst publishers
• Publishers seeking larger market share
• Integration of content with TOCS/secondary data. No longer just the journal
• Promoting e-service brand/recognition eg ScienceDirect, Wiley Interscience, Synergy

Trends:
STM Publishers

• Database brand increasing over journal brand
• Creation of portals (eg Kluwer, Elsevier
• Some major STM publishers reluctant to participate in aggregators' services
• Experimentation with pricing

Publisher collaboration

• Traditionally little collaboration.
• Now for the benefit of users:
• CrossRef:
• More than 10 publishers providing metadata. 1.7 million articles
• 3100 journals involved
• 3 million articles by the end of the year
• PILA: 50 members

Trends
The journal

• E-version will become definitive
• Publication and peer review process to speed up
• 'Continuous' publishing
• More functionality
• Will the journal disappear?

Trends
New competitors for publishers

• SPARC (ARL)
• E-print servers eg
• Los Alamos
• PubMed Central
• E-BioSci
• Open Archives Initiative - linking
• Often Government funded
• ICAAP
• Co-existence: commercial and new initiatives

Distance learning

• 'Commercialisation' of education
• Growth in distance learning
• Challenge for publishers: licensing, pricing, access

Authors' rights

• Authors asserting their rights in electronic environment
• Recent action against database publishers
• But mainly with freelance writers (eg magazines)
• Publishers reviewing contracts with authors

E-books

• Recent rapid growth in e-books
• New players eg netLibrary, Questia, ibrary
• Blurring of distinction between books and journals
• Access to 'parts' of e-books

E-journal pricing models

• Ongoing experimentation
• 'Negotiation' possible
• 'Content' is increasingly what will charged for. Delivery format optional
• Increasingly will be based on usage, and size of customer
• Subscription to core material - transaction' price for peripheral material

E-journal pricing models

• Subject cluster pricing to grow
• The growing archive will have a price on it
• How long will the subscription model last?

Pricing survey

• Most still charge a 'bundled' price
• More publishers offering electronic version unbundled from print
• ...and at a lower price
• Growing numbers offering article pricing (typically $15 US)
• More offering consortia pricing
• More providing access after cancellation
• More will charge for archive

A lot more for a little extra

• Major publishers offering access to complete list
• Through a surcharge on base price
• Multi year agreements
• With fixed annual price cap
• WIN/WIN?

A lot more for a little extra

• Publisher wins: guaranteed revenue; greater visibility of titles
• Customer wins: wider access (viz Ohiolink)
• However:
• Differing library views/needs
• Effect on selection policies and budgets?
• The non-major publishers?
• Unsustainable?

Subscription agents

• Traditionally
• Supporting libraries in procurement and in access (eg consolidation)
• Electronic:
• Supporting libraries with procurement
• Web-enabled; e-commerce
• New markets - eg desktop procurement for corporate customers
• Consortia services

Subscription agents

• Access:
• Resource discovery tools eg TOCS
• Full text gateway services
• Full text aggregation
• Licence issues (and 'Model Licenses')
• Opportunity for rights management services

SwetsnetNavigator

• E-journal gateway service
• 3700 fulltext titles
• From 66 publishers
• 15 000 TOCS
• 0ver 7m articles in total
• More than 700 000 fulltexts

Agents and consortia

• Swets Blackwell contact with some 120 consortia
• National, regional, medical, government, corporations
• Consortia seeking agreements for databases and full-text journals
• SB providing value added services to consortia and publishers
• Swets Blackwell and consortia
• HEALlink - Greece
• KESLI - Korea
• FineLib - Finland
• Various pharmaceutical companies
• Consortia in Russia, South Africa, Taiwan etc
• NESLI - UK

National Electronic Site Licence Initiative [NESLI]

• E-journal initiative
• From Jan 1999 - three years
• Initiative by UK Higher Education Funding Councils.
• Open to all 180 UK universities
• 'Voluntary'
• Uses model licence
• Single interface - SwetnetNavigator

Use of a managing agent

• Partnership between Swets Blackwell
• And MIMAS - at Manchester University Computing
• Role: to manage the service overall
• Works with a Steering Group

NESLI managing agent

• Undertakes negotiations with publishers
• Provides a single interface
• Handles subscriptions
• Administers licenses between libraries and publishers
• Handles subscriptions
• Develops new services eg linking, catalogue records etc Agreements with publishers
• Agreements with 12 publishers; offering 2600 titles. Includes Elsevier, Academic, Kluwer, Blackwell Science, ACS etc
• In negotiations with more publishers for 2001, incl Wiley, IEEE, CUP (estimate of 20 publishers)

NESLI

• More on NESLI: http://www.nesli.ac.uk
• Recent NESLI evaluation report: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub00/nesli_evaluation_report.html