1. Eduserv notes
Slide 1:
Why ‘thorny issues’?
Well a thorn can be painful and hard to get out but it can also be part of a beautiful
relationship between a rose and its stem – I’ll leave you to speculate which one is the librarian
and which the publisher! So it is a cause for hope and regeneration as well as an agent for
discomfort.
I’m looking at the issues here from a personal perspective rather than showcasing my
institution’s arrangements, so the examples given will be generic rather than specific in the
main.
Slide 2:
In the next half an hour or so I hope to cover all the topics listed on this slide at least in part.
Really my role is to give you some food for thought from an information professional’s
perspective; to talk about issues which have already occurred with licenses, and to look at
some user groups and issues around ‘authorised user’ and ‘site definition.
I’ll also link with later presentations when I look briefly at issues around interactivity between
the licence and the electronic resource management system. I’ll finish with a look at where
we might be heading in the future.
Slide 3:
Licences are the contract between customer and provider of electronic content, and can be for
anything from a large database or journal collection to one single title.
Their main purpose is to allow facilitate access to material purchased by a subscriber and to
set out details of who can use the material, where from, when, by what method of
authentication – and what cannot be done with the material. Licences protect both parties
involved from any misunderstandings.
Model licences – which try to present the same basic group of clauses no matter which
provider or product is involved, bringing some uniformity of wording and understanding to
the process – generally present the following types of clause:
• Licensor responsibilities (to make information available, maintain service and
servers, support authentication, provide usage statistics, support OpenURL)
• Licensee responsibilities (ensure use for education purposes only, some copying and
downloading allowed; not allowed to share material with non-authorised users or to
use it for commercial purposes, make necessary efforts to inform users of licence
conditions)
• Security (who can access, where they can access from, how or by what means are
they permitted to access…)
• Payment (usually quoted price and including list of what is paid for. This is very
important when determining which resources or titles you get as part of your
subscription)
• Terms and termination (what happens after cancellation; what happens if there is a
dispute over terms and conditions)

2. Slide 4:
If you consider the types of user there may be in a university they usually fall into the
following categories:
· Current teaching, research and support staff. The core people on the university
payroll. In addition there are teaching staff on honorary contracts who have the
same account and borrowing privileges as other staff. All these people will have
full access to the range of institutional e-resources.
· Teaching staff on franchised courses (who have honorary contracts, therefore full
current members of staff) or on validated courses (these institutions will be
expected to support courses by purchasing their own resources so these people will
have walk-in status)
· Support staff involved in teaching (for example a librarian at a partnership
college). Are these ‘teachers of authorised users’ or are they entitled to be treated
as staff in their own right for the purpose of assisting their students?
· Students following franchised programmes (who are current students of the
awarding institution but just happen to be based elsewhere) or validated
programmes (who have no status as students and are considered to be allowed the
same privileges as walk-in users)
· UK or non-UK based. Contentious as universities are often contractually bound
when setting up courses to give the same student experience regardless of where
that student is based. And how do you differentiate the distance learner who
returns home (outside the UK) during the time they are registered as a current
student and the student who is wholly non-UK based? For some providers, an
indication of where students are based and numbers is enough to allow access
under licences; but it is difficult to discriminate between ‘our’ students, especially
in the UK.
· Everyone else. Alumni, and others who are generally treated as walk-in users with
no rights of access to e-resources which do not allow this type of use.
Slide 5:
Partnerships:
Briefly, here is a rundown of the difference between a franchised course and a validated
course, both becoming ever more common in the university sector.
An example of a franchised course is where University A designs a course and it is then
taught at College B. The students at College B enrolled on this course are students of
University A, on the student record database, and declared as part of University A’s HESA
returns.
An example of a validated course is where College B designs a course and gains University A
accreditation to award a degree to its students. Students enrolled on this course are students
of College B and treated as such, although they can gain access to some material at University
A as walk-in visitors.
One general condition of a validated course is that the College which has designed the course
supports it with resources they purchase themselves rather than relying on the resources of the
validator.

3. Slide 6:
Joint courses (or in some cases, joint faculties):
This is where an institution co-designs and co-runs a course with one or more other
institutions. Students enrolled on these courses generally have one ‘home’ institution and are
then taught at all the institutions participating in the course award, by teaching staff from each
of the institutions. Status of students on these types of courses can be complex and open to
interpretation by the e-resource provider and the institutions involved.
In the case of a joint faculty which is owned by more than one institution, students in theory
are ‘home’ at both institutions but modules would be institution-specific; such schemes were
often in operation before the move to a largely digital-based world.
Of course such collaborations could be between different sectors as well – HE with FE, HE
with schools (for example for SCITT teacher training schemes – School Centre Initial
Teacher Training). HE with industry (for example management training schemes for
engineers).
Slide 7:
Commercial partnerships can be a controversial issue when considering license provision.
Generally the sponsorship of teaching or research by a company is not considered to be a
commercial activity (there is a definition in the JISC Model Licence confirming this); but
there are grey areas about how students on industry placements may use resources (or indeed
part-time students who work in commercial companies), and about courses which are partly
or wholly delivered within industrial settings (although again these students are usually
current with all the associated rights of a current student including full online access rights to
support their study and research).
Defining commercial itself is also open to interpretation, although most licences now include
clauses which attempt to provide some guidance.
Slide 8:
Alumni are often a large contributor to university fundraising. These former students are
generally allowed membership to the university library at a cost, allowing them to borrow
hard copy material but not to gain access to electronic content.
Some providers have started to introduce schemes which allow access to online material if the
institution pays an additional fee, although this has not yet appeared in the more generic
model licences which form part of core negotiations on behalf of the HE sector and instead
are very much ad hoc arrangements.
Alumni are becoming a much courted set of users in universities and the requirement to offer
them more for their money is likely to be an increasing factor in licence negotiation and
acceptance.

4. Slide 9:
We have already mentioned walk-in users.
As a recap, they are quite often a large group – especially so when an institution allows access
to members of the public as day visitors for free. They can members of the NHS, teachers,
solicitors – in theory anybody.
When they use resources in a participating institution they generally agree to a set of terms
and conditions which a/ protects the provider from misuse of a resource and b/ prevents the
institution from inadvertently breaching their licence conditions. Walk-in users must
authenticate in some way and be identifiable, and their access to resources must be restricted
to those resources where a licence allows access.
Moving from print to e has caused some problems in areas where the material was once
available to all without restriction providing they had a right to be in within the university
library buildings; some groups, particularly in the NHS, may now feel disenfranchised and
walk-in user provision works for them. But it is ironic that a visitor may be allowed more
access to an institution’s resources than a legitimate current student based outside of the UK.
Slide 10:
Moving on to another user group which can be potentially large: distance learners. Here we
could also place the lifelong learner or the student who is involved in widening participation.
These students may rarely or never visit their home institution in person but instead follow
their course somewhere else. The term could also apply to the part-time evening student who
spends the rest of the time working in a school, a hospital, a company, etc.
Since most e-resources were opened up to off-campus access the distance learner has not been
a poor relation to the student taught on campus on a full-time basis, but licences should be
clear on authentication methods allowed and on any regions where the material may not be
accessed so as to ensure resources are accessed correctly.
Slide 11:
I’d like to highlight some site definitions at this point, as this can be a confusing area within
licences, and in some cases, even impacts on the price an institution will pay for a resource.
Here, both OUP and the American Academy of Pediatrics are clear on the definition of a site
– one where all buildings are in the same city. The AAP goes on to clarify that the site should
also be under one central administration, something which is also a condition for single-site
definition at the BMJ. IEEE goes further in defining a site as one where buildings exist
within 5 miles of each other.
However many institutions have grown in such a way that their campuses may not be in the
same city, although they may be centrally administered with one HR department, for
example. Some licences also stipulate that campuses must be joined together in some way in
order to be classed as ‘single-site’. Universities generally have one IP range across all their
campuses so it can be difficult to keep to a condition of site definition which is distance-
defined. The cost implications are as yet not significant but with more providers moving to a
site-based form of charging, this may change.

5. Slide 12:
From the same group of four licences, let’s look at the definition of authorised user.
BMJ mentions students or staff based within the same IP range, or authenticated through
remote access. OUP mentions everyone as long as they are securely authenticated. IEEE has
‘persons affiliated’, ‘persons physically present’ and ‘other persons’ with permission; while
the AAP asks for ‘current, authenticated affiliation’.
These are very similar terms, but can mean slightly different things. For example, I would
take IEEE’s ‘other persons’ to potentially mean someone who can be securely authenticated
by the institution but not necessarily be ‘affiliated’.
Those licences which mention affiliated staff and students do not go on to define the term.
Again, this could be open to interpretation.
Slide 13:
I wanted to link with another presentation being given today in briefly looking at how
licences interact with ERMs and how machine-readable clauses may help. Currently
electronic resource management systems tend to require manual input of licence details and
conditions, which can be time-consuming and prone to error. Initiatives such as ONIX-PL
can only speed up and clarify this process, and allow clear guidance to be issued to end-users,
with clauses easily and quickly searchable.
I’d also like to highlight the fact that most licences are wordy (anything up to 15 pages) and
full of legalese and jargon. A more user-friendly approach is badly needed to ensure the
maintenance of contract between end user and provider, and the goodwill between the two.
Model licensing has been with us from around 15 years now – we’re probably all familiar
with the JISC and NESLi2 model licences, Eduserv’s Schedule 4, and the work done by John
Cox Associates for licensingmodels.org - and provides a clear benchmark by which to assess
individual licences. I would like to see more providers adopting a model template, which
would reduce the number of times an institution has to seek clarification of a clause only to be
told that the provider doesn’t quite understand it either!
I’ve put inconsistency on here because there are still a lot of grey areas in licensing; I think
we would all like to see a consistent approach at least in key clauses.

6. Slide 14:
Now we move on to another thorny issue with licenses – how to keep the historical record
from one contract to another. It is relatively easy to find out what we have access to now, but
what about 2, 3, 5 years ago? What about perpetual access to content or post-cancellation
access? In a print-based world, there were no such concerns but in terms of e-resources,
considerations such as these are extremely important.
Definitions of an authorised user may change – which can impact on user groups as earlier
mentioned. One example of this is where a provider decides to no longer allow access to
students who are not based in the UK, which could leave a course cohort without any resource
support part way through their studies. If a current licence supersedes a past one, how can
this change be addressed?
Where and when is a wider issue – if where refers to both geographical and authentication,
are the two exclusive, or are the two impossible to reconcile? When can refer to both a time
issue (for example is maintenance and associated downtime of a US-based resource generally
done to favour its own geographical audience, or is it fairly distributed between different time
zones?) or to content itself – does the licence cover both current content and backfile
material?
Authentication can also change between licences and sometimes has to as different forms of
access evolve.
And finally, does a new licence really override a previous licence in all points? Or can it be
interpreted that the previous licence, referring to the previous content, is governed by one set
of conditions, and a new licence is governed by another?
I’ve put ‘why’ here as an open question – why does all this matter, does it matter, and if it
does, are we any nearer to having an effective solution for managing old licences?
Slide 15:
Here are a few theoretical instances where the institution and the provider may differ in their
view of the conditions of a licence.
All this equals the view that licences are (by necessity and definition?) grey – should they be?
And what is a licence’s main focus? I think it should be to allow access to those who have
paid for it, but there should of course be a balance between the do’s and the don’ts.

7. Slide 16:
Here is a quick slide with some closing thoughts about how universities currently operate.
Overseas campuses are a relatively new innovation, where a UK based institution opens a
campus in China, for example.
Overseas partnerships have been around for some time and continue to grow as this is a
lucrative market; but in some cases students are disadvantaged and/or have unclear status
because of the country in which they happen to be based.
Partnerships we have already mentioned, as well as joint initiatives. Will more joint
initiatives lead to a pooling of resources? In the print world there is already some movement
towards resources being shared between institutions – how easy would this be to achieve for
e-content? (For example agreements which allow access between a university and its NHS
members under one subscription).
Courses validated in the armed forces are growing and is an interesting area – commercial or
not?
CPD and lifelong learning we have mentioned – important functions of HE and FE, but how
are they served by e-resource provision? And how does widening participation, an important
initiative of the last government’s administration, fit in?
And finally there can be a wider range of partnerships between universities and their local
business community, or their local public library.
Slide 17:
I can only see partnership arrangements flourishing and evolving over the next few years;
licences need to be ready to evolve with them.
Alumni we have already talked about – students who leave a university will have high
expectations when they join as alumni members, especially in institutions where there has
been a huge shift from print to e content.
Further innovation, especially in terms of links with commercial partners, is inevitable – are
licenses ready for this? Universities are generally not keen to infringe, but to make something
happen under negotiated conditions.
Finally, it seems that the ‘virtual campus’ has been discussed for many years. Is it just a short
step from courses running in Second Life to a student-free physical university campus with
everyone accessing material through an internet connection?
Can we really pre-empt what will happen in a world where everything technological is
advancing quicker than we could ever imagine?
End.