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Electronic journals are already the medium of choice for many librarians, researchers and students. This trend looks set to accelerate as solutions to issues relating to access and archiving begin to emerge. As an industry we have discussed at length issues surrounding the price of journals, whether or not electronic journals will be less expensive to produce and purchase than paper, whether they can provide greater value for money as part of a licensed package, and what the pricing and business models should be for the future. What we have tended to overlook is the costs of Administration and managing not only the electronic journals but also the collection of journals as a whole, because one thing seems reasonably certain, paper and electronic journals are likely to co-exist for some time.
In spite of considerable efforts by libraries, agents and intermediaries to develop systems and ways of working to minimize costs it seems apparent to me that the cost of administration electronic journals is in fact far higher than that for purely paper journals, and higher still when both media co-exist. What is worse it appears to be growing. The reasons for this depend to some extent on how the collection is managed but a major contributing factor in almost all cases seems to be connected with the fragmentation of the purchasing and access systems.
Libraries now 'buy' journals in a number of different ways - the normal subscription process through an agent in either electronic or print form, bulk purchases through one or more consortia or an agent, as part of an aggregated database of full text journals, direct from the publishers in some cases and of course individual papers are purchased through electronic document delivery services and ILL. Which of these methods a library decides to use in purchasing its journals is entirely up to the library, but those publishers who insist that all purchases of electronic content must be made directly sometimes restrict their choice.
Purchasing is quite different for electronic titles than for paper. In the electronic world libraries do not buy the journal but rather pay for a licence to access the content. As a result the purchase and the means to access the content need not be linked, there can be many routes to the licensed content.
It is possible to access electronic journal content in many ways, though in the end they all end up by either accessing the publishers website or a licensed copy elsewhere. Libraries can go directly to each publisher's site, or possibly that of an intermediary (eg Ingenta, Metapress, Extenza etc) who stores and makes available the publishers material for the publisher. Alternatively the library may make use of an agent's gateway service to access the content since then all the electronic journals can be searched, accessed and usage analysed through a single system; they may have their own internal service to achieve the same results, or buy in an electronic journal management system, for example that offered by TDNet, Serials Solutions, Ebsco A-Z and others. They can access content through a variety of other intermediaries such as abstract and indexing services, CrossRef links or alternatively use the version on an aggregator's database. Or they could load all the material under licence onto their own servers and intranet and access them directly on their own system. As a result of this plurality of access routes many libraries and their users can access the same content by a number of different routes, which can make the management of access more complex whilst at the same time promoting choice.
This fragmentation of the purchasing process and the separation of the access system from the purchasing agent can cause considerable problems for both libraries and subscription agents, both of whom are simply attempting to manage the journal holdings to ensure they are receiving the correct journals and content, know what access rights they posses to the various services and systems and have sufficient information on price and availability to simply calculate the cost of renewals and new orders, place and pay for the orders together with the signed licences, IP address information etc, and then set up the subscriptions, check accessibility and resolve any outstanding problems. A more intricate process than existed with paper.
This process is now so complex that it is becoming increasingly difficult for both libraries and agents to manage the entire process properly, largely because of the fragmentation involved rather than any insuperable management problems. This area is traditionally managed by subscription agents but since the acquisition process is now so fragmented good management of the full process is becoming both more difficulty and more costly to do. For example some of the bulk purchases undertaken by libraries through consortia or possibly directly with a large publisher may involve taking the paper copies at deep discounted prices. The agents may not have been involved in these arrangements and may therefore have already invoiced the paper and/or individual electronic subscriptions at list price. The result is muddle and confusion while the exact requirements are redefined and then refunds, claims and coping with the seemingly inevitable subscription breakdown which occur to everyone's frustration and cost. This situation is made doubly difficult for both library and agent when publishers refuse to deal with agents for the electronic content, even when their customers require them to do so.
These bulk purchases often give the library better value for money than they might previously have obtained. However it is sometimes the case that there is as much to be lost in financial terms over the collection as a whole as there is to be gained by some of these arrangements. This is because the bulk purchase may be done directly with the consortium or the publisher, which results in a smaller spend with the agent. This in itself does not matter much but very often the agent has quoted a price across a large number of titles and the service charge may be related to the amount of business placed with the agent as a whole. If doing a single deal results in falling below some threshold the library may find that the rest of its acquisitions cost rather more than any savings made as a result of the bulk purchase, and their overall costs of serials administration is increased.
Even where this effect does not happen there are still some interesting impacts on agents' services which should be noted because they impact on the library. Bulk deals with discounted print pricing in which the payment for the licence goes directly to the publisher or via a consortium mean that the amount of money paid for the paper journals through an agent is obviously going to be less than before. As a result the agents discount from publishers, which at least in part funds the services provided by agents to both libraries and publishers, and which is frequently calculated as a percentage, will be less in absolute terms. However the work done by the agent remains the same and because of the link to the bulk purchase of the electronic material, will probably end up being more involved and complex than previously. So the agent is doing more but receiving less reward and that is most likely to lead to an increase in the service charge to the library.
Bulk purchases generally account for only a fraction of the total number of subscriptions required by the library. There are many thousands of other journals from smaller, frequently society publishers which also have to be acquired and accessed. These tend to be left with the agents who are expert at acquiring content from publishers. But once the larger publishers are taken out of the equation what is left is making arrangements with many thousands of publishers each of whom probably has on average rather less than two journals and would like to licence their content to the library. Since it is cheaper to licence journals in bulk than one at a time (because a single licence agreement can cover many journals) it is obviously going to be the case that the service fee per title for smaller publishers electronic content is likely to rise. Again agents may be able to offset some of these costs by increased efficiency in their increasingly automated, web enabled procurement systems, but it is unlikely they will be able to so vastly increase their efficiency that all such costs can be absorbed. Again service charges are likely to rise. So bulk deals and the separation of the channels of purchase are leading to increased administration charges from agents.
With numerous purchasing and access methods now being handled by the library, not to mention licence negotiation, maintenance and consortium meetings etc it is nor surprising that the library too is finding administration costs increasing. The management of electronic titles calls for greater skills than was the case with print and so electronic journals are taking a much greater amount of professional staff time. This naturally leads to increased requirements for additional professional staff. If this is not forthcoming there is likely to be a reduction in efficiency overall as the skills of the professional staff are spread increasingly thinly over a complex operation. There comes a point at which the inefficiencies resulting affect the service which is very definitely a cost to the library, or it could potentially result in a limit to the expansion of electronic journals or other services, both undesirable from the point of view of library, users, publishers, agents and intermediaries.
With libraries taking on more and more electronic journals other challenges have begun to impose themselves. These include the costs of setting up subscriptions ie logging on to the publishers website and providing the details required to enable the publisher to turn on access and checking that it is working properly. This can be time consuming and at times not especially straightforward. And nor are the problems associated with access denials which can be caused by subscription breakdown, incorrectly setting up the access requirements, errors on the part of the publisher or a host of other reasons. Finding what has gone wrong and correcting the fault can take a considerable length of time. Related to this is the challenge of actually finding out when things have gone wrong since it is difficult to monitor every one of several thousand titles all the time, and doubly difficult if there is any lack of clarity about what content should be 'up' at any time. If missing paper issues was difficult then electronic journals can at time seem to have such challenges in spades!
In fact simple administration accumulation of this sort may prove a limiting factor on the growth and uptake of electronic journals unless some remedies are found. The answer of course is to outsource this sort of function to organisations with an expertise in serials supply generally the subscription agents. Doing this would probably help publishers as much as libraries since it would lead to specialist involved in journal set up which should reduce calls to help desks and increase the quality and consistency of information provided. Involving third parties would also ensure that access denials, when solved for one library, would be solved for all again reducing the amount of calls to the publishers helpdesk and so on. Agents would in general be better placed to provide such support in local languages, which again would help the smooth functioning of the process from everyone's point of view.
For this to happen of course means that agents need to be more fully in the picture and to become more not less involved with the entire spectrum of the libraries electronic journal arrangements. It is perhaps no great surprise to discover that libraries seem to feel the same way as indicated by some recent ASA research.
The ASA has recently completed some research into libraries purchasing preferences (Mari Connal and Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University shortly to be published in Serials) to see how they view the acquisition process in the future. Nearly 80% of all libraries surveyed indicated they thought they would be using agents services more or about the same in the future. 44% indicated they were likely to use agents more, and all thought they would be increasing their E-journal collections and reducing print in this period. Given that so many libraries already use agents for just about all their journal processing this amounts to a fairly substantial indication that libraries may want to outsource more of the administration and management of their electronic journal subscriptions in the future.
Just as interesting were the preferences expressed by librarians for purchasing electronic journals. Again 44% would prefer to purchase through agents, compared with 35% for consortia, only 15% want to purchase direct from publishers. (At present 30% go direct to publishers and 43% buy through consortia but only 25% use agents for the purchase of electronic journals indicating a sever mismatch between what libraries want to do and what they find themselves having to do.) Many respondents expressed a wish that agents would move much more strongly into the field of licence negotiation and management and indeed that appears to be happening with many agents now offering such services, and many have of course been doing so for years.
To add to this I recently carried out an informal survey on several List Servs about the costs of electronic journal administration. Even though the sample was small it was apparent that administration costs were a growing problem for many libraries and that most felt it was likely to get worse: only one felt that e-journals would eventually reduce costs. Most seemed to want their agents to provide more services in this area. (See Rollo Turner Counting the cost of e-journal administration on www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/lis-e-journals.html)
All this is indicative that the costs of e-journal administration are substantially higher than we would all like to think. But it is also fairly clear that there are answers to these challenges.
This fragmentation of the means of acquiring content and providing access has resulted in librarians handling much more of the administration and day-to-day management of the journals acquisition process than was previously the case. At the same time and possibly as a result of this fragmentation libraries and agents are finding substantial and growing increases in their costs.
However there are some substantial economies of scale in the electronic journal business. What is true of licensing is also true of many of the more administration functions, in other words many journals can often be handled more cost effectively than just a comparative few. So for example it is cheaper overall for a few agents to keep a database of electronic journal prices, licence requirements etc than for all libraries to do it individually, and as has already been discussed above, access problems may be more efficiently dealt with by agents thus helping to reduce costs.
But the real gain will come when the fragmented acquisition process becomes more integrated. I do not for one minute suppose that the plurality of purchasing and access mechanisms will decrease, in fact I suspect rather the reverse - we are more likely to see many new and innovative services develop for providing access to journal content. However there does need to be a means of integrating all these different channels under a single 'umbrella' so that it becomes much more cost effective to provide services right across the available journals in both electronic and print form. If libraries decide to reduce their costs by outsourcing the administration and purchasing functions for electronic journals just as was the case with paper, they will need to do this through specialist organisations who have experience and expertise in handling subscriptions, the administration of electronic journals, are able to deal with thousands of publishers and understand the libraries requirements well enough to start handling licence negotiations and their subsequent management. This would enable a return to single invoicing (with savings on foreign currency transactions and a reduction in the number of cheques cut), reports could again be generated across the entire collection rather than just parts of it, faculty billing information could be applied across all material, pre-prepared MARC records for OPACs could be supplied, advice on the most efficient means of purchasing content (aggregator, electronic document delivery, bulk purchase, single subscription etc) could be given and a single help desk function for the day-to-day problems of administration, access and so on provided - with considerable savings to the library in terms of administration and management time spent on routine but important tasks.
Agents are therefore likely to be become 'integrators' working with many other organisations such as consortia, publishers access providers, other specialist agents etc to ensure that the library continues to be able to manage its access rights and collections in an economic and efficient manner and that publishers have a simple and straightforward distribution channel to the market.
To do this it takes a few simple steps. Libraries need to recognise that there are many complex and interrelated procedure involved and outsourcing them cannot be done piecemeal if a good standard of service is to result. The outsourcing needs to be done so that an integrated service can be provided which means channelling the acquisition arrangements through a small number of intermediaries. These additional services cost, but they should be cheaper using an intermediary than 'going it alone' because of the economies of scale involved. Publishers also need to recognise this as a necessary process in the transition to electronic journals and welcome the greater efficiencies that this process could provide, because the savings are likely to be spent on content. Publishers, both large and small should therefore support their customers - as many are trying very hard to do - and accept orders for electronic content through the libraries intermediary of choice (or direct if that is what the library wants). If this causes problems for some publishers then it is up to the agent and the publisher to work together to resolve such issues.
Perhaps crucially agents will need to develop their services further and in greater depth than ever before to provide the range of management services that the market would appear to require. In fact it seems likely that agents will be providing a range of services to libraries and consortia in the future that may be closer to consultancy than the traditional agency services of the past. This is already beginning to happen as the larger agents develop services and automation which will enable libraries to obtain licence information and negotiation services, electronic licence maintenance, journal set up and administration and so on. Agents will also need to continue to develop their services to publishers if they are to make an impact on selling electronic subscriptions to the library market, especially for the smaller publisher where the costs involved are probably the greatest. And indeed this is also beginning to happen with many interesting developments now going on from companies such as Ingenta, TDNet, MetaPress, divine and Extenza to name just a few.
In conclusion then it seems that the fragmentation of the purchasing channel and the diversity of access channels are leading to higher administration costs for both libraries and agents. Reducing these costs is important if libraries are to make a rapid transition to electronic journals and the way to do this would seem to be through outsourcing many of the administration function to intermediaries who will need to develop their services to meet these challenges. Libraries appear to be recognising this and it would appear that many expect to use agents' services more not less in the future. There are clear signs that agents are providing a new range of services for their library customers in a bid to match these requirements and it is hoped that publishers will continue to support and encourage such developments. Economies of scale and fierce competition amongst agents and intermediaries should ensure an overall lowering of costs for libraries and a more efficient channel to the market for publishers.
page last modified 18/06/02, © ASA