Can Agents Really Deliver on Their Digital Promises?

1
Can Agents Really Deliver on Their Digital
Promises?

• Fourteenth North Carolina Serials Conference,
  Chapel Hill, NC April 15, 2005

Bob Boissy Manager, Subscription Agent
Relations Springer
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Digital Promises

• All scholarly journals will be available online
• All scholarly journals will be interlinked and
  highly accessible
• Scholarly journals online will be better than
  print journals
• The online environment will be stable
• The business models will be sustainable
• The agents will aggregate metadata about online
  journals, license terms, and pricing
• The agents will also offer portals and host sites
  for content

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Digital Market Forces

• Larger publishers want their imprint viewed as a
  database with both breadth and depth
• Users now expect volume 1, issue 1 content online
• Library Consortia want to drive new business
  models
• The Open Access movement wants to drive new
  business models
• Subscription Agents want to support collection
  development trends - but what are the trends?

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Digital Desiderata

• We all need data on which journal issues are
  available online, and which journal volumes are
  available to which institutions
• We are all looking for simpler business models
• We are all looking for perpetual access
  guarantees
• We are all banking on online journals seeing far
  more use than print journals
• We are all looking for sustainable ways of making
  the scholarly record available to users

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Questions for Agents Part 1

• Are agents over-committed to the print
  subscription world? Are they hurt by migration
  to e-journals?
• Can the agents support Open Access, even if it
  means lower STM journal prices and commissions?
• Do agents support the draft standard ONIX for
  serials, and what do they want publishers to do?
• Do agents think that programs like LOCKSS which
  allow local e-journal archiving are worth
  supporting?

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Questions for Agents Part 2

• Do agents think licenses between publishers,
  libraries, and themselves ought to be made
  public?
• Would agents favor a system where all
  subscriptions were billed at list price, with
  custom license prices serviced through a system
  of credit balances?
• Do agents offer the exact same services to
  publishers that do not provide any commission as
  to those publishers that do provide a commission?

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Thank you

• Bob Boissy
• Manager, Subscription Agent Relations
• Robert.Boissy_at_Springer-SBM.Com
• 866-269-9527 x-616 or 781-681-0616