Back to work

All the Roman ICOLCers are by now presumably back to the everyday problems and work...
If you have any comment to add, keep on using this blog...
And let me thank Paola Gargiulo for the wonderful organization and all the people who worked with her for making this ICOLC so interesting!

Current Final Discussion

The internal ICOLC affairs session is taking place at the moment and ICOLC members are discussing on the following question:

Is ICOLC supposed to give an answer to the EU consultation on the scientific publishing study?
A working group has been set up: tom or david, help me with names!

Is...

...Tommaso going to drive us all up to Stockholm?

2007 Fall European ICOLC Announced

Next year the fall European ICOLC meeting will take place in Stockholm, SWEDEN.

ICOLC Business session

To great applause Kari announced that Stockholm, Sweden will host the next European ICOLC.

As part of the traditional wrapup, Tom asked if there were any issues of common action which should be addressed.

1) The question of a common input to the EU Commission was raised. There was comment that other organizations would a more appropriate source of such input. Other comment pointed out that a statement does not come from ICOLC per se, but is only formulated by ICOLC members and endorsed by individual consortia as they see fit. The decision was made to establish a working group to see if agreement could be reached on any recommendations which individual consortia might be willing to endorse. These recommendations would need to be shared with the group before February in order to meet EU timetables.

2) The issue of encouraging open access articles to be reflected rigorously in reduced subscription prices will be brought up in the spring 2007 meeting of ICOLC and a possible common position will be explored there.

3) Tom brought up the issue of individual library/consortia support of the Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. More money is still needed.

The group thanked Paola and her staff with great applause for all her/their efforts for a wonderful and productive meeting. Arrivederci Roma!

Consortia Business 2 - Saturday

SCELC - internal operational database - Rick Burke.

To track, manage, and invoice an elaborate array of licenses among a wide variety of members SCELC has developed an internal software tool to manage this effort. Handles and calculates cost models, facilitates susbcription management and invoicing to a great degree.

May be worth a look for many groups. contact rburke@scelc.org. Has demo version you can play with.

Finland- Customer Satisfaction; where to in the future - Kristiina Hormia-Pontanen
Again - see the PPTs.
In this case it appears "customers" is broadly defined to include not only the students, faculty, researchers but also the liraries and their administrators who are part of the consortium receiving services from the National Lib of Finland.

FinElib looking at the future and changing environment - user needes, technology, services, cost efficiency opportunites, impact on research and teaching. And how to communicate all of this to the constituencies.

eIFL.net 5 years of growth in developing countries. Jan Andrzej Nikisch - see PPT
Now independent organization with members around the world. Programs designed to license content, build sustainable consortia, support creation of institutional respositories, digital libraries, advocate for open access, reform of copyright law, access to open source software, and other service areas.

tom

Gala Dinner

More pictures from the dinner and the conference to be found here

Resource Sharing session

National Licenses in Germany for digital content - goal is to ensure the full range of international array of resources available in at least one German library in physical or electronic form. E form taking precedence. Monika Cremer's PPT's lays out which institutions are involved and which publishers have been included for broad scale electronic access - ejournals, ebooks, etc. - and requirements for access, archiving, etc. DFG will fund about $27 million this year. Some questioning of the specific prices being charged Germany although no specifics provided. The general question was raised, why are we reluctant to share these/

Future of Resource Sharing (Rethinking it) Dan Iddings- started with 2005 white paper - see Rome ICOLC web page with presentations and resources. Discussed world wide since then, Goal -create global service framework for information delivery. What does the patron really want and need? Effort to move this ahead focused in BLC, PALCI, CDL. with a few others, all librarians. How does the effort get a broader perspective. Thinking in terms of find and get which is what the user wants. See PPT for the questions being raised and the next steps. Group is looking for input and ideas.

Knowledge Exchange Cooperation among DEFF, SURF,JISC, DFG Bo Ohrstrom
Idea is to structure informal exchange into a continuous activity. Began in 2004. Has board with reps from the 4 groups. Does not fund projects- appears to try to coordinate initiatives, practices, ideas, professional development. Once again the PPTs provide good background. Discusses lessons learns in working with four different organizations.

2007 Spring ICOLC Announced

Next Spring ICOLC meeting will be held in Montreal on April 22-25 2007.

Mass digitization

Sandler gave a pep talk and general overview of the Google digitization project at Michigan. His message focused on the Google project as neither demonic visitation nor the coming rapture -- but simply as a reasonable project to make information resources available generally. He invited other libraries to also consider digitizing their materials.

Holder briefly explained a bit more about the technical details of mass scanning as done at the U. of Toronto in the Open Content Alliance project.

Question: What does Google get out of this major investment? Sandler is not sure they have a clear model for getting a return on their investment other than possibly an advertising increase.

Question: As more libraries become involved, how do you prevent redundant scanning? Sandler says you can look on Google Books but noted that there is quite a time lag between scanning and public availability.

EU Scientific Publication Study

In this first morning session (of our last day of conference) we have been discussing about the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe, commissioned by the European Commission.
This web page is keeping us up to date with the responses to the study and many other initiatives connected to the study.
Let's keep in touch through SINAPSE to keep on following this issue!

Policies for Access

We've heard three reports on the economics of journals as viewed by European Commission report and a European study of journals. The PPT's will make clear the interests, rationale, results and recommendations of each speaker.

ECARES study - No real surprises in terms of what we all generally know. For profit journals and not-for-profit journals distributed via for profit publishers are more expensive than NFP publishers. The more the circulation and impact factor the higher the prices for all journals. Question posed by Victor Ginsburg- Given that journals are fixed cost operations why wouldn't higher circulation drive down a price? (My answer- because in a market driven product the price rises as demand goes up. Cost is irrelevant except as a floor, not a ceiling. Duh.)

Study concludes the Big Deal is not by definition problematic but has the usual suspects of pros and cons. But from my view it appeared the perspective is based on a Big Deal, or bundle of journals, as bought by an individual libraries. It does not account for the modifying affect possible from a group approach.

EC rep covered why the EC was concerned and commissioned the study and report on scientific journal market and is interested in pursuing the debate on EC policy on research funding and publication. And including requirements for deposit of research in open access repositories.

European issue of the impact of VAT on e-journals and the need to eliminate it was discussed.

The crowd may not have been fully awake but an interesting set of reports, conclusions, and challenges.
tom

ERMS Vendor Grille

Ted Koppel, Ex Libris
See PPT for what he provided on summary of product and pricing

E-L Q - Do we need to buy Oracle license. (Question riased because Oracle prices have been rising significantly).
E-L A - Included in price.

E-L Q - Interface to Banner/Peoplesoft interface purchasing systems.
E-L A - Not yet. Maybe in 24-26 months.

E-L Q - Have to use their workflows?
E-L A - Seven pre-programmed. Sounds like some flexibilty that they must change.

E-L Q - Maintenance percent?
E-L A - Negotiated.

E-L Q- How much time to implement?seems complicated.
E-L A- "It depends" - Do you have a previous ERM? Can data be migrated? What is the environment into which it will fit. Apparently no simple answer.

E-L Q- SFX/Verde Kowledgebase interaction?
E-L A - Activity triggered updating on the SFX side when a record changes on the Verde side.

E-L Q- Userfriendly permissions displays?
E-L A- Quick answer, yes.

E-L Q- Are we naive to think that SFX-Verde will solve all the problems we thought it would?
E-L A - Not naive but not entirely yet.

E-L Q- we gave up years ago trying to keep up with Proquest 5000 title changes. Is ther hope with Verde?
E-L A- Vendor's vague answer seems to put the monkey back on content providderds back

Cristina Blanca-Sancho, Serials Solutions
See PPT for what he provided on summary of product and pricing

There only a couple quick questions - at 6:06 PM this group was toast!!

tom

Vendors Grill - ERMS

Talking about Electronic Resources Management Systems, it may be worth having a look again at the Digital Library Federation Electronic Resource Management Initiative, gone into Phase II:

http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm05.htm

Break Out Sessions

Some notes gathered during the wrap-up session on the group discussions.

Most of them have question marks... and they should be dealt with more in depth if we had time...

We could set up a single thread for each topic and have your comments following if you wish...

Statistics

SUSHI to be implemented soon to help consortia!

Problem with unreliable statistics from publishers

Cost division

Some consortia implement usage in cost division within consortia together with historical spent

Solidarity within consortium amongst very different institutions (possibility to give to a third party this duty?)

My comments: is this going to give the perception to institutions that this third party is “enemy” like publishers? (psychological issue)

Money from the government obviously makes a difference

Crucial: strong communication among institutions (my comment: do we all have tools to be effective in communication?)

National licenses

Criteria for definition:

1. Very broad access to the material: all kinds of institutions included (from public libraries to private individuals)
2. central funding available to cover most of the cost

To start with you should concetrate on a special sector of databases or material

Size of the smaller countries make things easier..

Sustainability of central funding is an issue: do we have control on this money?

Important issue: do we need every kind of resource everywhere?

Consortial cooperation

Could ICOLC have a better role in enhancing communication between consortia?

ICOLC is informal and does not have resources (money, people or anything) to support initiatives but that’s a need that should be taken into consideration

Ebooks

How to raise awareness?

FTE based or simultaneous users based pricing

Interlibrary loan to be available or not?

Acquisition models: buy directly from publishers or use different platforms?

Are there many end-users who still want to have the print material?

Is the ebooks market still immature?

Scholarly communication

Moving away from big deals? How?

How do you pack raw data to make them available? Is open access the way to use this material? What are the publishers going to do about that?

Difference between scholarly communication and scholarly publishing?

Are blogs and other informal ways of spreading knowledge going to play a role?

We need to be smarter than publishers in "exploiting" the informal resources to spread and preserve knowledge...

Licensing Models

We heard about the NESLI2 trial business model they implemented together with ContentComplete: there are a few fears about changing business models but we do need to continue to look for different models...and to share experiences with other consortia, as Tony Kidd said.

Licensing

Estelle's report on JISC licensing issues identified a number of specific areas of likely interest to librarians arranging contracts, but did not provide specific contract language. She reviewed both the issues in their standard contract, including provisions allowing the library to provide a local cache of information for quicker access (e.g. in a teaching situation), as well as a cutting and pasting option so that patrons could include small amounts of text in teaching tools, dissertations, etc...

Among the new provisions of interest were an open choice clause which allowed for proportional reduction in subscription costs if authors have paid for the open choice option for their article. There were also a number of issues involving access to patrons in distance learning situations.

The slides are well worth a look over to see useful issues to be addressed in the contract if not the actual wording to be used.

Paul Harwood reported on a very interesting pilot project in the UK experimenting with various versions of Pay Per View rather than a Big Deal. For the variations of PPV you need to look at the slides but the final result is that PPV costs libraries more than the Big Deal approach. As always, choice costs.

A key issue which seems to be emerging is how to arrange for subscription reductions based on the amount of open access articles in the journal (where the author has paid publication costs in order to make the article open acces). It's still early days but worth paying attention to.

At this point the projector went south and a purely verbal presentation continued. You, dear reader, will have a better presentation by looking at the PP slides than the actual attendees got!

Tony Kidd continued the verbal only presentation as the projector remained missing in action. He mainly talked about the UK ambivalence to the Big Deal and their continuing search (see Harwood above) for a different purchasing model. There appears to be some useful and interesting information in his slides reporting on the Glasgow participation in the above Pilot Project. (The projector returned to duty towards the end of Tony's presentation.)

Conference Highlights

It looks like Tom and David are being the serious ones... I have just found the time to collect all the pictures together: you can find them here.
Keep on checking, you will find more!
If you have some nice pictures you want to share with everyone, please send them to me and I will upload them!

Preservation

Tom is doing a good job of providing a blow by blow report of the presentations and Q/A sessions, so I'll just mention a few highlights. For the overview of core preservation mechanisms, check out the CLIR report discussed by Ann Okerson. It's available for free download from the CLIR site. If you're interested in buying an insurance policy for your electronic data rather than getting involved in a lot of technical procedures (e.g. the LOCKSS or CLOCKSS options), check out PORTICO. It's important that your insurance company be reliable both organizationally and financially and that certainly seems to be the case with PORTICO with its Mellon deep pockets and JSTOR antecedents. Do keep in mind that it's still early days so not all your electronic data will be covered (about 5,100 titles at PORTICO so far), but the price is not too bad and the coverage will surely grow. A final interesting point about PORTICO is that it is set up to cover not just catestrophic failure by a publisher, but also "perpetual access" issues if a library decides not to renew a contract.

Last night dinner...

...of the Southern European group

Morning start - Preservation

Very significant presentation by Tommaso Giordano from the European University Institute, which underlines the inconsistency of long term preservation policies within consortia.
His survey opens up to a few talks about some preservation initiatives: PORTICO, LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, KOPAL

Preservation and Access Session

See PPT's of all presentations for more details on all these topics

Results of Tommaso Giordano's and Paola Gargiulo's recent survey on ICOLC list on preservation:
-35 responses - 16 US
-How many licenses - 1241 - 624 US
-Presarvation responibility - Nat'l, 3rd parties, library consorit dominate
-Most important clauses - Price, def of authorize users, opt out clause
-22 of 31 - archive access via publisher; 14 of 31 - supply to licensee
-Most prevalent service - e-resource licensing
Digital repository plans ((19) 7 -Fedora, LOCKSS, KOPAL; 6 considering alternatives

also survey of 330 libraries in Europe
-90% say presewrbvation intrinsic task of libraries; 75% say is very important
-67% consider it improbable that digital files will be usable in 100 years

Ann Okerson -CLIR survey on preservation
- newly published last week. Now available on the web at

 http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub138abst.html

Ann summarized who the 12 systems are that were studied - government sponsored, member subscriptions, consortial. 7 offer live access, 5 only if event triggered.

Study identified 7 indicators of viability which Ann highlighted selectively. She also highlighted the study's conclusions and recommendations. The study is 120 pages long and will need to be studied by all. It can hardly be covered in depth here.

Antonio Fantoni, CIBER, quickly suggested that preservation should be (multi) government funded to recognize the importance and guarantee unuversal access. This in front of the upcoming presentations might make for interesting discussion afterwards.

Bruce Heterick -Portico
- 23 publishers, +5100 titles now on board
-150 US libraries subscribed
-focus is on the preservation of the content itself from vendor source files
-using NLM Archiving and Interchange DTD to normalize the data
-to have access when trigger events occur a library must financially support Portico - pricng based on tiers of annual material expenditures - world wide price schedule.
-several trigger events related to publisher or title cesing to function or otherwise be available.
-P can be used a post-cancellation access mechansism if publisher agrees - not all do-see Portico web site

Questions - when will P approach publishers in Japan? (as they can, limited by resources).
Open access journals (talking/will tak to them). What about those who wait to support P? (likely will be disencentives for waiting)

Peter Burnhill -CLOCKSS, LOCKSS

-CLOCKSS = Controlled use of LOCKSS technology
-2 year project (2006-) - can it be trusted and scalable as a decentralized redundant dark archive. Techically and economically sustainable and scalable?
-funded by participants - currently 7 libs (1UK, 5 US, OCLC) and 12 pubs (the usual major commerical and some society suspects);
-CLOCKSS boxes are working and ingesting publisher data.

Questions - how many libraries afre needed at scale? (not sure but geographically and politically diversity is needed to ensure proper redundancy protection.)

Helen Hocks-Yu UK LOCKSS pilot program.
-outgrowth of discussions in 2003
-seed a set of LOCKSS users to gain expertise, evaluate, etc.
-24 months from Feb 2006 - 30 libraries involved; to crawl 4 NESLI2 model license pubs plus other publishers(??). Not crawling yet??
-longer to get going than expected. Will 2 year pilot be long enough?
-LOCKSS addresses post-cancellation issue . CLOCKSS adderesses more broad preservation perspective.

Thomas Wollschagler - KOPAL cooperative archive approach in Germany
-a more technically oriented presentation which I won't try to accurately represent here. see PPTs
- to conserve bit stream of data
-to ensure access over time
-multiple partners in the effort (see PPT slide)
-multiple storage sites
- June 2006 - began ingestion


Clearly from the presentations everyone thinks preservation of a comprehensive digital scholarly journal archive is extremely important. There was not time to pursue people's thoughts on the relative merits of these porjects or how they fit together or what else is needed. We will try to come back to this on Saturday.

tom

Thursday-Consortium business - session 1

Several presentations here covering different experiences.

1. Capes of Brazil has a very broad government sponsored, centrally funded electroinc resource program that provides a very rich and envialbe array of resources. The PPT's to be posted will give you a sense of the resources and effectibveness of what they are doing.

2. American International Consortium of Acdemic Librieas (AMICAL) - a unique set of geographically dispersed and locally isolated libraries. How do they collaborate? A few of their unique challenges were covered.

And a tired group adjourned after a good day. All the PPT's of today should be on the web at
http://www.aepic.it/conf/papers.php?cf=7

tom

More pictures to come...

Our blog is experiencing a bit of a loading problem this afternoon... pictures still cannot be loaded, but they will be online soon...

Afternoon - Measuring Use

Sorry folks, blogger was unavailable from here for a good while - what's happened since the ACA-CAS session? We had a great lunch!!!

Also, we have just completed a long session with 6 speakers on SUSHI and various applications and expereiences with the collection of and application of user statistics. These are listed in the conference program. When the PPT's are loaded these are worth reviewing and following up as needed

Several demonstrated ssystems for accessing stats- such as Jose Fernandes' and Nunzio Femmino. Many spoke to the usage patterns and dynamics of e-journal usage- such as in Turkey, Italy, andFinland.

Faye Abrams provided an experience with MINES which provides qualitiative data which enriches and compliments the quantitative data.

Jose Fernandes'work with JURO4C open source software to collect and manage stats across vendors could be of interest to a number of groups and might prove very valuable for collaborative effort. Development of SUSHI is essential and in combination with this software may be effective.

tom

"Emerging" Languages

my attention was drawn by Long Xiao's statement about the multilanguage issue seen from the Chinese prospective: it is not so much a problem of exporting scientific work ( Chinese researchers will write it in English) but of importing the world research to China.
It is a crucial point to have in mind - I find - when evaluating which resources should be dedicated to developing of multi-language search engines and platforms.

ACS-CAS Grille

ACS is briefly explaining it plans for new international pricing - tiers based your profile of institutions and relative use and taking into account local economic differences -possibly using the four World Bank Icome Classifications for countries. Use will not be an ongoing factor that will affect price changes in future years. Also a discount structure based on how many titles you get - but a graduated one, not an all title package or nothing program. Plus single invoice discounts. Designed in part to try to make more titles affordable for more smaller libraries. Will adjust journal prices to reflect relative value(usem impact factors, # articles pulbished etc.)

So it may get complicated but it means winners and losers from current prices. Say they will manage this changewith those affected even if "you may not like where it ends up". So if you are on the losing end it may be gradual (how gradual?) but in the end some economic pain level will be involved. Specifics not yet defined. Clearly this is heads up - how will this affect each of us?

Now CAS on SciFinder Scholar - and first a little product background......now to pricng rationale- Think about academic market by Phd, MS, BS, then geographic, then users and uses. 1300 Institutions - 44% US, 56% non-US. 38% come through consortium agreements. Want one contract, min 4 schools, one invoice preferred

Presenter making the case that since 1998 CAS has evolved into a multi-options for academic and that academic prices are highly highly discounted to make affordable to all BS and MS only chemistry programs (over 650 susbcribe). Also saying prices have not risen much or at all.

ACS Q - what is the degree of adjustment between winners and losers in the new price structure?
ACS A - adjustments won't be too bad among groups and countries - and overal revenue neutral to ACS versus current pricing.

ACS Q - market is saturated with "reasonable" price increases - if it ain't broke don't fix it? Why go through all the pain?
ACS A - saturation maybe yes in US other developed countries but not otherwise. This will be fairer (example: rectify problem with historical high duplicate print copies).

ACS Q- can we incorporate samll corporations?
ACS A - would have to talk - corporate pricing is different

CAS Q - why no allowance for walk-in users?
CAS A - based on concurrent users - saves use for our patrons. If small tech firms use this for walk-in use this undercuts CAS direct sales. Would like to look at unlimited use possibilities.

ACS Q - what is the role of the consortium in the new model if everything is calculated by library? Will this raise price of higher used journals?
ACS A - No, prices will not rise greatly in high use, high prestige journals. Consortia role- no less than now and incentives for single pay groups.

CAS Q - You would get much higher penetration across chemistry programs if the threshold/concurrent user prices were lower.
CAS A - Penetration is good and much improved from the past. Balance between what academic versus corporate markets pay must be kept in balance.

ACS Q - Will model reflect discounts for country economics? and to allow open access in developing counties?
ACS A - limits on how far discount structure can go and what it can accomplish

ACS Q - Is it really revenue neutral or just another way to get more money? (From an attendee who feels burned with others).
ACS A - Yes and factors like use will not be used after tiers are set.

Getting warmed up but ran out of time.

tom

Some morning pictures to start with...

t-shirts selling...

first coffee break...

second session starts...

More - emerging economies

More -Emerging economies

To add to David's and comments - questions raised to Elsevier focused on how we as libraries will be able to afford an even greater publishing universe resulting from the added growth in publication. Are the publishers who are courting authors and the journals building a flwed system? To absorb the increase in scholarship the price per unit of information must decrease. Will this be accomplished or will our problems as purchasers just be aggravated?

tom

Session 1 - The Changing economics of publishing. Emerging economies

Very interesting session that broadens up our prespective in scientific content production and distribution around the world.
I guess we will find some answers to the issues raised in the EIFL talk that will take place on Saturday morning, at the end of the conference.

Emerging economies

The three main emerging economies identified were China, India and Russia -- but the dominant focus of the presentations and the questions/comments afterwards was China. For many different reasons, ranging from anxious concern to business opportunities, it really appears that all eyes are on China. Figures provided by Elsevier suggested that Russian academic publication is slowing down, possibly due to the brain drain of scientists in the last decade. The lack of conversation about India may be related to the fact that no Indians are present at the conference. But whatever the reasons for lack of focus on Russia and India, China and events there is clearly the overwhelming center of attention.

Hello all - we are off to a great start. Paola Gargiulo and her crew have organized a great meeting. Wireless in the room and plenty of power strips. There is even a conference t-shirt that can be bought. A terrific agenda and lively crowd, no doubt in good spirits just from being in Rome - the weather is perfect - the city beautiful - the food and drink great.

Stay tuned as various attendees report on the meeting, maybe even some photos and remember you can find the conference program with links to related materials at
http://icolc06.briccaevents.it

tom

Test post

This is an initial test post -- David

This is an initial test post. TS

ICOLC Fall 06 Web Site

Here we can find a detailed programme of the ICOLC meeting 2006, information on how to get to the event and a rich bibliography of the topics of the conference.

Welcome to the ICOLC Conference Blog

This blog will provide coverage of the meeting. Relevant comments are welcome. Its purpose is to stimulate discussion during and after the meeting.