[Lyrarl] Update on Project MUSE and JSTOR ebooks

Thu Feb 23 09:55:19 EST 2012

Celeste, 
Rutgers insists on our writing in New Jersey law. 
The trivkiest licenses I have dealt with are European, with mention of entirely different legal system. I ran into this twice with databases from France. 
Tom Izbicki 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Celeste Feather" <celeste.feather at lyrasis.org> 
To: "LYRASIS ARL Collection Development Contacts" <lyrarl at lyralists.lyrasis.org> 
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 9:46:55 AM 
Subject: Re: [Lyrarl] Update on Project MUSE and JSTOR ebooks 

Louis, 

Thanks for raising this important point. ARL has created a checklist of licensing issues that I am using as a guideline for negotiations with vendors. The position that ARL has taken on governing law is that a license should remain silent on this point, specifically because we want to create agreements that are acceptable across state and country borders. I suspect there are some legal teams at institutions that require specific mention of local governing law in a license agreement, and if that is the case, then there will need to be a short amendment to a central license agreement specifically for that institution. 

In my own experience at a large public institution several years ago, while a mention of specific state law was preferred in a license agreement, the university lawyers also would accept silence on the matter as a fallback position. Obviously the more we can unite behind a single agreement, the more efficiency we can bring to the process. If amendments and exceptions need to be made though, we’ll create a mechanism to make that happen. 

Celeste 

Celeste Feather 
Licensing Program Account Manager 
LYRASIS 
celeste.feather at lyrasis.org 
800-999-8558 ext. 2954 (Toll-free) 
678-235-2954 (Direct) 
404-550-6459 (Cell) 
celeste.feather (Skype) 

www.lyrasis.org 

LYRASIS: Advancing Libraries Together. 

From: lyrarl-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org [mailto:lyrarl-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of Louis Houle 
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 8:43 AM 
To: 'LYRASIS ARL Collection Development Contacts' 
Subject: Re: [Lyrarl] Update on Project MUSE and JSTOR ebooks 

Good morning Celeste, 

Thank you for the update and good luck with the negotiations. I would like to bring one important issue with any License Agreement: the governing law. From the 126 ARL members, 18 of them are located in Canada. As you probably know, when we do negotiate a license in Canada with a non-Canadian vendor we do want to have the License Agreement to be governed by the specific laws of one’s province (Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, etc.). Within the ARL context and knowing also that in the United States an institution always want to have the governing laws of its own state, how do you think this can be managed for such a deal. I do not have all the answers but I just want to bring this important issue to ARL and LYRASIS. 

Louis Houle 
McGill University 

From: lyrarl-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org [mailto:lyrarl-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of Celeste Feather 
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 17:18 
To: lyrarl at lyralists.lyrasis.org 
Subject: [Lyrarl] Update on Project MUSE and JSTOR ebooks 

All – 

I want to provide an update for you regarding the ongoing negotiations that LYRASIS is conducting with vendors on behalf of ARL and its members. University press ebooks are the first priority. Members of the ARL licensing working group, Tom Sanville from LYRASIS, and I met with Dean Smith and Melanie Schaffner of Project MUSE at ALA Midwinter in January. Kathleen Keane, the Director of Johns Hopkins University Press, also attended to add perspectives from the UPCC publishers to our discussion. 

Apart from pricing, the primary issue seems to be the lack of completeness of the MUSE collections. As a group, the MUSE/UPCC publishers are withholding around 50% of their academic title output from the MUSE collections. We learned that MUSE/UPCC built their business model based on feedback from librarians that they wanted to purchased ebooks with unlimited use and few DRM restrictions. The economic reality is that many of the UPCC publishers receive substantial percentages of revenue (up to 50% on some titles) from sales of their books to students where adopted for course reading. They cannot take the economic risk of selling these ebooks to libraries for unlimited use. Therefore, the publishers are guessing which titles are likely to be adopted for courses and are withholding them from the MUSE collections. Typically it may be several years after publication before it is clear whether a title will be subject to any significant course adoption. Other titles are excluded due to digital rights clearance issues, but these seem to be the minority of the titles withheld. 

Non-inclusive collections provided by MUSE create title tracking problems for libraries, as it is cumbersome to determine which new titles are expected to be part of a collection and which others will need to be purchased separately. One way to improve the situation is to make the MUSE collections more complete, but there will need to be a different business model with limited use for titles that are already adopted for courses or that later become adopted. Without some use restriction on certain titles, publishers cannot afford to put all of their titles in the MUSE collections. We discussed some possible ways forward at the ALA meeting and felt that the discussion was productive for all parties. 

On the pricing front, I gathered purchase history data for books with 2010 imprint dates from 12 of the larger MUSE/UPCC publishers in an effort to calculate average amounts spent by various sizes of libraries. I used data from OhioLINK, the Colorado Alliance, the Triangle Research Libraries Network, and 2 other ARL libraries to show purchasing patterns in 111 libraries from these 12 publishers in 2010. The data strongly suggested that the pricing for the MUSE collections needed to be reassessed. In order to acquire the same type of publisher content that had been purchased in the past, libraries would be required to spend substantially more under the initial MUSE pricing. The collection prices were roughly along the lines of what large research libraries on average have been spending for content from these publishers. However, due to the lack of completeness of the collections, libraries would need to increase their overall annual expenditure with these publishers significantly in order to acquire both the MUSE collections and the needed titles that are withheld. 

Project MUSE staff met with the UPCC advisory board on Feb. 9 and discussed these issues with them, and we are expecting a report from that meeting soon. We are hopeful that negotiations will be productive and that we will be able to put a new offer for MUSE/UPCC ebooks on the table in April, 2012. We also are working on licensing issues in compliance with ARL requirements and may need to build some timelines into a license to give MUSE appropriate time to meet all of our requests. At this time there does not appear to be any showstopper issue in the license document. 
We also have had an initial meeting and conversations with JSTOR regarding their forthcoming ebook collections and are waiting for them to share additional information with the working group. JSTOR is very aware of the ARL group interest. 

I’ll be glad to share more information or respond to any questions you have on this topic, and I’ll keep you updated as the negotiations continue. 

Celeste 

Celeste Feather 
Licensing Program Account Manager 
LYRASIS 
celeste.feather at lyrasis.org 
800-999-8558 ext. 2954 (Toll-free) 
678-235-2954 (Direct) 
404-550-6459 (Cell) 
celeste.feather (Skype) 

www.lyrasis.org 

LYRASIS: Advancing Libraries Together. 

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