The power of consortia: a UK perspective

Abstract

For more than a decade, the consortium has been a winning formula for libraries the world over in securing electronic resources for their patrons via negotiations with aggregators and publishers. In the United Kingdom, the protagonist in the provision of e-resources to the British academic community is the national consortium named JISC Collections. It is a mutual trading company established in 2006 under the umbrella of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), a government-funded body maintaining the world-class JANET network and incubating research and higher education. JISC Collections, along with a series of working groups to help it, negotiates deals for digital content and has to date concluded some 120 e-resource licence contracts, saving its members millions of pounds sterling. NESLi2 SMP, a recent project seeking agreements with small and medium sized publishers, complements NESLi2 which negotiates with most big publishers. The licencing and other agreements are drawn up in accordance with the Model Licence, a stable and secure framework updated annually. Another mode of leveraging savings for libraries is the Knowledge Exchange, an international collaboration of national consortia of four countries. JISC Collections’ National E-Book Observatory Project concerns the licensing of e-textbooks to academic institutions. In the surveys taken within this project, over 48 000 responses were received and analyzed. The outcome indicates that making e-textbooks available, free at the point of use, is not a threat to publishers’ print sales revenue – a finding which surprised many publishers.