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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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• 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?

Digital Market Forces

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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@Springer-SBM.Com

• 866-269-9527 x-616 or 781-681-0616