Challenges to Licensing from Some Publishers
Last revised: January 2010
Ivy Anderson, Director
Collection Development and Management
California Digital Library
The University of California libraries and the California Digital Library understandably receive recommendations and questions about providing the UC community with access to digital resources from the publishers mentioned below. Products from these publishers have been identified as priorities for systemwide licensing, but they fall well outside norms of pricing and/or other standard or desirable features for electronic content.
In addition to facilitating the provision of digital content to all campuses through systemwide negotiation and licensing, the CDL seeks to influence the marketplace through its licensing decisions. We think that we can best serve the long-term interests of UC faculty and students by insisting on products that meet our quality standards and that can be sustained over time. We often find that publishers change their initial models after feedback is received from the community.
The following information is provided not to criticize any particular publisher, but to explain to the UC community why systemwide licenses are not yet available for certain resources. We continue to monitor these publishers' institutional licensing models in hopes of negotiating reasonable and acceptable terms for UC-wide access.
Nature Publishing Group
Once again the CDL finds it necessary to list Nature on its Challenges to Licensing web page. Three issues have prompted serious renewed concerns in 2009:
- Lack of sustainable long-term pricing
CDL was pleased to negotiate what we believed to be a stable pricing agreement with Nature Publishing Group in 2008 for both Nature and its companion titles, following several years of extremely steep price increases (for example, in 2007 UC's actual costs for Nature increased by 65%, far exceeding the rates published by NPG on its website).
Dishearteningly, in 2009 Nature has informed the CDL that it again plans to sharply raise licensing fees for the University of California Libraries, this time by as much as 400% beginning in 2011 - an order of magnitude amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. - Excessive price increase for Scientific American
Nature Publishing Group has recently taken over publication of Scientific American from its sister company at the Holtzbrinck group. With this change in management, the cost of UC's online site license would be more than twice the fee currently charged for systemwide access. It is worth noting that this fee represents a 'discounted' offer: the list price quoted to the CDL is well over five times our current cost. The price of an institutional print subscription is also increasing more than seven-fold.
There is no plausible justification for raising online licensing fees for Scientific American to such exorbitant levels. As has been pointed out by others (see for example the Open Letter from the Oberlin Group libraries at http://www.oberlingroup.org/open-letter-scientific-american-oberlin-group-library-directors ), pricing a general interest periodical such as Scientific American at such levels is unreasonable and unlikely to be considered a fiscally responsible investment by many libraries.
For this reason, the University of California Libraries have unanimously decided to cancel an online license to Scientific American upon expiration of the current subscription in May 2010.
Campus libraries will be happy to work with faculty and students to identify alternative high-quality sources of scientific news reporting and analysis. - Loss of perpetual rights and cost increases for transferring titles such as Polymer Journal (published on behalf of the Society of Polymer Science, Japan)
UC will lose access to the 2006-2009 archive of Polymer Journal in 2010 when the content moves to nature.com unless we sign a site license. These years were formerly available on J-Stage, which now will maintain a closed file through 2005 only. Campuses expect more than a doubling of the print or e-only pricing.
Given these concerns about Nature's pricing policies, adding future Nature Publishing Group titles to CDL or campus licenses is highly discouraged at this time.
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
A 2004 letter from the AAAS addressed to each UC campus indicated that AAAS intended to charge its top 150 users a higher rate for Science Online in order to recover lost revenue from advertisements and to be more fair to average use institutions. UC's cost with the new pricing model was ten times what UC libraries spent on AAAS print journals in 1999.
To put this in perspective, a similar letter from AAAS in 2002 cited membership losses as the incentive for a new pricing model and resulted in an 80 percent price increase to UC. The cumulative effect in 2004 of those two AAAS price increases was a tripling of UC costs over 2002. In 2006, the subscription price of Science Online increased again by 11%, more than twice the rate of most other publishers.
While AAAS has moderated price increases since that time, these exceptional price increases have never been rolled back or, indeed, fully justified to the CDL's satisfaction.
In addition, AAAS continues a policy unique in the industry of charging a supplemental fee for access to 'as soon as publishable' articles under the rubric Science Express. Virtually all other publishers today consider early publication to be a normal feature of the online publishing environment. For research-intensive universities, many of which already pay a higher, usage-based licensing fee for access to Science, the additional surcharge for Science Express amounts to a further tax on access to cutting-edge research. The CDL encourages AAAS to abandon this fee.
Due to these pricing policies, UC librarians are reluctant to license additional AAAS titles or products.
UpToDate (submitted by the UC Health & Life Sciences bibliographer group)
UpToDate is a popular online point-of-care clinical information resource that most of the UC Health Sciences Libraries wholly or partially fund for their campus' healthcare providers and medical students. Unfortunately, UpToDate's refusal to allow remote access to authorized users as part of their basic license fee, or to charge a reasonable extra amount, is of great concern to UC libraries. A recent price which UpToDate provided to UCSD to provide remote access with its contract would have cost an estimated $500,000 annually, on top of the annual license fee. Numerous UC and other academic health centers have raised this concern with UpToDate because their remote access policy is not in keeping with the policies of other publishers.
Remote access is vital for the UC community. Physicians often need to consult information resources in response to patient care needs while off-site. Affiliated medical students and residents often work rotations in clinical locations outside of the UC, or want to learn more about conditions they encountered as part of their studies from home. UpToDate's practice of not permitting remote access as part of the basic license fee falls outside the norms of pricing and standard features for electronic content. Due to this, the University of California Health and Life Sciences librarians feel obligated to alert the UC community about UpToDate's unacceptable licensing practices.
