Chairwoman: Anna Mette Morthorst

The year 2009 has been very busy and marked by renewals, including multi-annual agreements like Taylor & Francis, Oxford University Journals and Wiley-Blackwell license agreements. Focus has also been directed at the optimization of administrative processes and collaboration in the consortium.

A number of courses and theme days were arranged during 2009.

A theme day on e-books with focus on e-book platforms where three major e-book suppliers were invited to present their suggestions for the purchase of single titles.

A contract and copyright course with American lawyer Lesley E. Harris. It was an intensive and interesting 2-day course with introductions to the various clauses and requirements one has to pay attention to when negotiating licenses. Anders K. Rasch from Copydan gave a talk on copyright and licenses as seen in a Danish context. Apart from participants from Denmark the course was attended by several license staff members from the other Nordic countries.

DEFF Online, where various suppliers were invited to present new products and licenses. It was the first time for this type of arrangement, but it was a success and is expected to be repeated in 2010. Nine publishers were invited, and 70 people attended.

In 2009 the license group held five meetings and has been working with a number of different themes:

Service declaration: A service declaration for the DEFF license secretariat has been prepared. The objective of the declaration is to ensure that expectations are attuned and a clearly defined agreement is reached for the collaboration between the participants in the consortium and the DEFF license secretariat. The service declaration determines the level of service. The DEFF license secretariat has visited the universities in order to get an overview and an understanding of work processes. The service declaration’s annual schedule shows how e.g. renewals, invoicing and statistics take place. The overall benefit is greater transparency of the many elements that form part of the license collaboration.

Price models and distribution models: A working group has produced a memo with calculations of the consequences of distribution models for the Danish consortium with various parameters like size, usage, budget, population (FTE, VIP, STÅ (= full-time student for one year)) and average prices for titles. As before the main purpose has been to find an up-to-date and transparent model instead of price models based on old print subscriptions. No final conclusions have been drawn, but the memo expands on previous model calculations and forms a solid foundation for the future work.

Flexible licenses: A paper has been prepared on flexible licenses. This type of license can be agreements signed across institutions, faculties, agencies etc. or subject specific licenses that cover individual libraries as part of a larger organisation. The memo shows a need for clarification of the handling of this type of license.

Sustainability: The license group has discussed long-term sustainability of licenses. At the moment there is no guarantee of future access to licensed resources – primarily periodicals. Work needs to be done on models for this kind of guarantee in relation to archival solutions, and there must be an assurance in contracts in connection with post-cancellation. DEFF and members of the group have participated in a Knowledge Exchange workshop in Edinburgh on this subject. Offers have been obtained on Portico which is one example of an archival solution.

The license group is represented in the programme group Information Supply and has moreover participated in projects from the programme group Architecture and Middleware, i.a. in a project that has been looking into possible systems for license administration (ERMS).

Together with LUB the license group has prepared a new action plan covering the period 2009-2011. The overall objectives are i.a. to enter into agreements on a common ERMS which can ease the administrative burden for the DEFF license secretariat and the consortium’s libraries and to get licenses where Open Access is taken into consideration in terms of the financing. Furthermore, we should mention the wish to make sure that the consortium gains access to more e-books via a coordinated effort which will create greater visibility for this type of licenses.