Five subscription agencies (Blackwell, Dawson, EBSCO, Harrassowitz, and Swets) are working with John Cox Associates, a British publishing consultancy specializing in licensing and content management, to develop a suite of generic model licenses for electronic journals. Model licenses have been posted at www.licensing-models.com for single academic institutions, academic consortia, public libraries, and special libraries. They are intended to expedite the licensing process once the parties have agreed to the business terms of the license.
Cox Associates drew on the UK Model developed by the Publishers Association and the Joint Information Systems Cqmmittee of the Higher Education Funding Counsels and the American Library Association's Principles for Licensing Electronic Resources.
The model licenses will continue to be revised for several weeks. The intent is to have them serve as the basis for the year 2000 subscription agreements. The model licenses are in the public domain, therefore, no permission is required to use them either as is or with modifications.
Those libraries and consortia planning to enter into licensing agreements in the next few months, should carefully review the appropriate model license and seek legal advice on any provisions that are not clear or are unacceptable; those elements should be negotiated. Typical of such points is a provision in each of the models that a licensee may not share information outside its own country even though the sharing would be allowed under the license if the sharing were within the same country. That would be a serious restriction on interlibrary lending between the US and Canada, or among countries in Europe.
Suggestions for changes in the models can be submitted by e-mail to John.E.Cox@btinternet.com.
