The role of agents, especially relating to electronic journals and licensing, is frequently called into question. It is perhaps no surprise to learn that those doing the questioning tend to be publishers: there are very few librarians requesting agents to justify themselves. Quite why this should be is, for an agent, hard to understand when the basics of the business relationship seem so obvious and so much in the publishers' favor.
The business relationship
Publishers seek to sell journals to scientific, technical, and medical (STM) libraries. To do that they identify the relevant researchers and send them direct mail leaflets, attend conferences, promote their journals on their Websites, and notify agents of their existence and prices. The agents promptly inform their library customers. For most publishers selling to the library market, some 80% or more of their library orders have in the past come through agents. The exact percentage differs among publishers, but it is generally a very high proportion.
This provides publishers with an attractive, simple, and effective route to their international markets, one in which they bear little or no exposure to foreign exchange risks, because agents generally take on that role. They can receive money in advance regardless of budgetary periods; they have a small number of large customers to invoice at renewal time rather than a large number of single invoices to be dispatched; and renewals are increasingly automated. Publishers' cash flow is improved, because the payments are generally on time when they come through agents (many customers pay their agents only after the agent has paid the publisher). A very large majority of publishers seek to support this distribution channel by providing agents with a (small) discount on the list price of journal subscriptions.
To libraries, the situation is also advantageous. The typical general academic library may renew several thousand subscriptions from well over one thousand publishers. Cancellations and new orders are a few hundred each year. All these orders could be placed with publishers directly, but this would require placing thousands of orders, determining the price variation applicable for each journal, and issuing thousands of checks in a great many different currencies. While small hospital libraries may have only a fraction of that number of journal titles, they also have proportionately less staff to devote to the task. The cost of administration is considerable; the potential for error is quite large if there are scarce resources to do the job adequately; and finance departments may be overwhelmed, resulting in late or incorrect payments depending on when budgets arrive as well as many other factors. The costs of dealing directly are generally reckoned to be considerably more than using agents and, by reducing administrative tasks, skilled librarians and information managers can concentrate on their primary role of meeting the information requirements of their users. As a direct result, more money can be spent on journal subscriptions. Publishers win both ways!
It should be noted that, generally speaking, publisher discounts are insufficient to cover the costs of all services provided by agents to their library customers. Agents will therefore charge libraries some small percentage above list price for their journals depending on the levels of service required by the library, the mix of titles, and the size of the business.
So what is different about electronic journals?
All the above statements remain unaltered by electronic journals. We tend to focus on a large number of challenges that we all face with electronic journals such as licensing terms, archiving, and so on and rather overlook the fact that they still have to be purchased. Purchasing has always been and, I believe, will continue to be a primary role of agents.
But electronic journals are, of course, far more complex than paper. Perhaps they should be simpler, because there are no massive distribution of paper issues to be dealt with, but in practice they are not. The absence of paper issues and the ability of the user, not the librarian, to directly access the journals on the publishers' carefully constructed and highly individual Websites may lead to the feeling that perhaps agents are no longer required. This notion is plainly incorrect. All the problems of the paper world have been, if not reproduced in the electronic environment, then at least substituted with even more difficult and expensive administrative nightmares. Consider just a few of these challenges.
Budgeting
When every journal can have several prices depending on whether institutions take site licenses with or without paper or through consortia or perhaps have to consider the number of full-time equivalents (FTEs) in the institution, or the likely number of simultaneous users, trying to calculate what the next year's subscriptions will really cost has become even more difficult than it always has been. To budget, libraries must have access to a comprehensive and accurate database of prices of all the versions of the journals they are likely to need from the thousands of publishers from whom they do or may require subscriptions. Given the price complexity of electronic journals, it would seem madness for libraries to be forced to do it themselves, when that has always been the role of agents. After all, it is always going to be vastly more cost efficient for a few companies to do it than for every library in the world to build their own system to cope with prices and budgets (not to mention payment, etc.). This helps publishers by enabling libraries to obtain clear pricing information on their requirements, which enables decisions to be made more quickly with orders placed more rapidly, accompanied by correct payments.
Licensing
There are some publishers who say that their licenses and arrangements with customers are too complex to allow for the use of agents or other intermediaries. One might argue that if publishers are making life that complicated for their customers, they need their commercial heads examined. Such statements are, if anything, admissions by the publishers that their operations are too complex and need simplifying. The majority of publishers are, of course, pleased to support the role of agents and others in helping their subscribers to understand, sign, and return their licenses.
The biggest problem is the fundamental need of competitive companies to differentiate themselves. With electronic journals, they can do this through their license without actually thinking about the consequences. But what good is it to have hundreds or thousands of brilliant licenses (and most are anything but), all of which are slightly different, if it strains the customers' abilities to understand them all and to comply with all their terms? When each license has to be read through and understood, problem areas identified and renegotiated so that some uniformity suitable to the customer can be obtained, this is a very high overhead on the sale and purchase of electronic journals to both publisher and librarian. What the market needs is uniform licenses with as much similarity, not difference, as possible. Of course, given the great range and diversity of content from publishers and the wide variations in requirements between some markets (pharmaceuticals and historians, for example), a single license is always going to be a dream. Given that this multiplicity of licenses is going to continue, who then would want to take on negotiations with hundreds or thousands of publishers?
This role is natural for intermediaries. The larger agents (EBSCO, Swets Blackwell, RoweCom, and HARRASOWITZ), with the assistance of John Cox Associates, produced a model license to try to help this situation several years ago,* and it seems a natural and inevitable extension of their services that agents should help to bring publishers and libraries together, taking on some of the negotiation and administration and helping publishers promote their journals and helping libraries to purchase and access them. But agents have on occasion been prevented in their attempts to help their customers in this way by a few publishers who refuse to deal with agents or intermediaries. Why they should do this and to what effect can only be surmised. As far as I can see, this refusal just adds difficulty and confusion to the marketplace and forces libraries to increase their costs by having to do everything themselves, rather than contracting out those aspects that could reasonably be handled by agents or other intermediaries. When all this was new, it was not unreasonable for libraries and publishers to want to talk directly with each other, but as the number of publishers and customers talking is now in the hundreds and will soon be thousands, most of whom will be small, this makes less and less sense for anyone.
For publishers, there is the temptation of trying to continue with this direct dealing, because it could reduce the discounts payable to agents. But this is likely to lead to an eventual long-term loss, even if there may be a few short-term gains, as the numbers of electronic journal subscriptions rises and we are again faced with the need to reduce the costs of administration. In general, this process can most successfully be done by intermediary specialists such as agents, because they can do the same process once and many libraries can benefit.
This process also helps publishers, especially the many small publishers who account for a high proportion of the quality STM journals. If scarce resources in libraries are taken up by constantly having to negotiate and administer licenses, then the larger publishers will benefit at the expense of the small, because libraries can, with a single conversation, deal with a large number of journals at one time. With smaller publishers, each conversation may last just as long but result in only one journal licensed. This overhead is very high for all libraries and for the smaller publishers who would then need to discuss terms with hundreds of library customers—something for which they themselves may not have the resources. Hence publishers too have a need for an efficient, inexpensive means of licensing their customers—a role agents are ideally placed to provide, but they cannot undertake such a role without the support of the publishing community as a whole.
Consortia
Perhaps as a reaction to some publishers' perceived high pricing policies and licensing restrictions, many libraries have formed purchasing consortia. This answers some of the problems of each library having to deal with so many publishers and helps publishers too for the same reason. Their formation has had some considerable impact on the industry. It has forced publishers to think about their pricing policies in the context of customer demand and to work hard on more customer-friendly licenses, but the industry is far from achieving agreement on every issue. It has also had an impact on agents, because to some extent the rise of consortia can be considered a substitute for agents.
It is interesting too that while publishers are very happy to deal directly with consortia, they are not so happy to deal with agents and intermediaries. This is strange, because some consortia are very effectively run by agents, for example, the National Electronic Site Licensing Initiative (NESLI), where Swets Blackwell and Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIMAS) undertake the day-to-day management, and publishers have been happy to enter negotiations with NESLI. All consortia are to a greater or lesser extent a form of intermediary, just as are agents. For example, many consortia in the United States are incorporated, that is, have a separate legal identity from their members; serve all types of libraries; accept libraries from a wide geographical area into their consortia, not just those within a particular state (e.g., Nelinet, Palinet); purchase electronic and sometimes paper journal material on behalf of libraries from publishers; invoice the libraries; and pay the publishers. This is exactly what agents do!
Increasingly, consortia are working together with agents where there are efficiencies in doing so, which all starts to make a bit of nonsense of the view that electronic journals in some way reduce the need for intermediation. What they seem to have done is increase it and add a whole new class of intermediary to the industry—the consortia themselves! Perhaps this should not be surprising given the complexity of the business of buying subscriptions and journal content. However, even consortia may find the next few years more costly as the number of publishers wanting to do deals increases and starts putting pressure on scarce resources. In some parts of the world, consortia have funds from their funding bodies, which are separate from the library members' budgets. In my view, it is likely that these special funding provisions will not last forever, and indeed several European consortia are already finding their direct funding sources beginning to dry up. Against this background, the time-honored experts in journal administration will likely be required to assist in the administration and possibly the purchasing on behalf of consortia to reduce cost and provide expertise in subscription management. In many cases, this assistance is already happening.
Access
Electronic journals are unlike paper journals, because they are not sent to the subscribers. The subscribers “collect” them by accessing the appropriate site. But in the electronic journal industry, there are several ways of doing this. Users can go directly to the publishers' Websites or indirectly through institutional interfaces designed by libraries, through commercial intermediary services (e.g., SwetsNet Navigator, Information Quest, EBSCO Online, ingenta, etc.), through aggregation services (e.g., EBSCOHost, Bell and Howell, etc.) or through abstracting and indexing service providers with links to the full content (e.g., Edinburgh Information and Data Access [EDINA] or MIMAS in the United Kingdom). They can choose to buy an online journal management system such as TDNet—in fact, the range of possibilities grows each year and, with linking services such as CrossRef, the possibilities become even more interesting.
It seems fairly obvious to most users of the services, as well as to librarians and to intermediaries, that there is much to be gained by having one interface or portal through which all such information can be accessed. Such services reduce the time and effort spent on learning different search routines, standardizes profiling services across journals, and provides the required information in a uniform manner. Publishers sometimes perceive this as in some way threatening. Those that do seem to think that such services undermine the full range of services offered from their own Websites, which they proudly believe provide better service for their customers. If that is so, then they have nothing to fear, users will undoubtedly choose the best service. The mistake, of course, is the belief that any publisher's users and customers are in some way unique. They are not. All researchers and users of scholarly journals read many journals regularly and even more occasionally, and the journals are most likely to be published by a wide range of commercial and society publishers. What is more, journals are far from the only resource that researchers need to access; everything from internally generated documents, abstracting and indexing services, databanks, clinical records, books, and so on also need to be accessed. The users' best interests are more likely to be achieved by services that include a wide variety of publishers and that link up a wide variety of resources in an integrated service designed for their needs.
Given the way the industry is moving, designing and building such a portal would be like painting the Severn Bridge—a never-ending task! All the more reason then for libraries to use some customizable system from specialist intermediaries to ensure their users get the advantages of customized services without all the maintenance costs. Even here, there are obstacles to what seems a very natural requirement. The most important is the fact that some publishers, including some of the largest, refuse to let intermediaries access their services on behalf of subscribers except, perhaps, through the use of CrossRef, which may not always be the best solution. All this will do is drive the industry down a path where there is no simple method of accessing all the journal content, unless all libraries develop it for themselves. This again simply pushes up the cost of the solution, because a few competing companies offering solutions to such problems should be much more cost effective for the customer. That money is most likely to come from journal budgets in the long term and that means less money for journal content.
Choice is important and, so long as customers always have a choice between competing services (and the choice of going directly to the publisher), then the market will eventually decide the most efficient way of acquiring, licensing, and accessing electronic content. But publishers need to understand that journals are an important part of the information requirements of their customers, not the entirety of it; that customers need cross-publisher services; and that providing such services is likely to increase usage not limit it. We all need to give our customers the maximum range of choice. The only people who can provide this wealth of choice are the agents and intermediaries, along with the libraries themselves. The role of publishers is to make sure that they support this multiplicity of choice, so that an efficient and profitable market can emerge. They cannot do that by keeping their ball to themselves and saying they want to play on another pitch. In the long run, it simply will not work as the power is always, in the end, with the customer. This, in effect, means that there must be some highly sophisticated rights-management systems to make sure that all publishers are assured that their content is safe and is used properly. At the same time, the system needs to assure customers of their rights to prevent duplication and to direct users to the appropriate resource and appropriate copy.
Conclusion
There are so many challenges to an orderly market for electronic journals that it is something of a miracle we have got as far as we have. One thing seems to me to be certain: there is a need for intermediaries for electronic journals to provide not just the simple purchasing mechanisms we have come to rely on in the paper world, but also to provide the extensive administration that surrounds electronic journals. These vary from license negotiation to access and rights management. Intermediaries will also be needed to provide efficient access services to all publishers' content and will need to be capable of dealing with the libraries' many and varied other information resources and requirements. In my view, these services will be supplied by agents and intermediaries as well as consortia and the libraries themselves, and that a better market will develop for all publishers, if they support this process of change rather than seek to control and restrict the supply of their content.
Footnotes
*The model license may be viewed at http://www.licensingmodels.com.