Helping Manage the E-Journal Forest

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The Serials Librarian: From thePrinted Page to the Digital AgePublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wser20

Helping Manage the E-JournalForestStephen Bosch aa University of Arizona , Tucson, AZ, USAPublished online: 08 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Stephen Bosch (2004) Helping Manage the E-Journal Forest, TheSerials Librarian: From the Printed Page to the Digital Age, 46:1-2, 179-190, DOI:10.1300/J123v46n01_19

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Helping Manage The E-Journal Forest:Do You Need an Agent Any More?

Part 2

Stephen Bosch

Presenter

SUMMARY. Electronic publishing is changing the business of serialpublication. Yet despite tremendous growth in the volume of electronicpublishing, traditional print publishing has not disappeared; consequentlye-publishing has introduced more complexity into the environment, andcurrent service needs co-exist alongside the need for new services re-quired to manage e-publishing. Some believe that electronic publishingwill be the end of the serial vendor or subscription agent; others are not soready to mark their passing.

Assuming that the current commercial model will remain relatively un-changed as the basis for most scholarly communication, the roles of serialvendors or subscription agents will change, but the services they bring tothe library and the publishing community will continue to prove valuable.Support will still be needed for paper subscriptions, and new services areneeded to manage e-journals. Of course change is inevitable, and thoseservice providers that fail to react to the changing environment will go outof business. Those that are able to develop new products will survive inthe changed environment. If the basic business model transforms, andfreely-accessible institutional digital repositories become the primary

© 2004 by the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Helping Manage the E-Journal Forest: Do You Need an Agent AnyMore? Part 2.” Bosch, Stephen. Co-published simultaneously in The Serials Librarian (The Haworth InformationPress, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 46, No. 1/2, 2004, pp. 179-190; and: Serials in the Park (ed: Pa-tricia S. French, and Richard Worthing) The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.,2004, pp. 179-190. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document De-livery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: [email protected]].

http://www.haworthpress.com/web/SERDigital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J123v46n01_19 179

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nodes for scholarly communication, then the publisher/vendor/ librarychain will become irrelevant. [Article copies available for a fee from TheHaworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:<[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>]

INTRODUCTION

Vendors have been an important fixture in the library/publishingbusiness model for a long time, but changes in the model are causingsome customers to rethink that relationship. In a digital environment,why do we need to work with vendors? Up to now, the vendor’s value-added services seemed fairly clear. Support for ordering, renewing,claiming, and invoicing was an important service that many librariespurchased from vendors without a large of amount of angst. Now, someof this service may appear unnecessary since many e-journals are bun-dled into packages that don’t require the same amount of basic servicesupport. Why not save the service charge and handle the order yourself?Why would a business developed to manage the acquisition of paperjournals be needed in an environment where libraries buy electronic ob-jects rather than physical ones.

There is not going to be a single answer to that question. Librarieswill have their own set of needs and resources available to fill thoseneeds. Continuing relationships with vendors will depend on how wellvendors can change to meet an organization’s needs. A small schoolwhose serials are all tied up in a few bundles may have little need for avendor, while a large library with significant paper subscriptions and alarge number of e-journal subscriptions with small publishers mightstill need a vendor’s services.

THE CURRENT SCENARIO

The current environment has not been favorable to serials vendors.There has been considerable contraction in the industry. The businessruns on notoriously small profit margins and limited library budgetgrowth; reductions in commissions from publishers, cancellations(mostly due to price inflation), and the costs of technological innovationhave all contributed to volatility in the marketplace. There are fewer andfewer choices as companies are absorbed into larger corporations or goout of business entirely. A large full-service vendor may now:

180 SERIALS IN THE PARK

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• Maintain a comprehensive database of more than 240,000 serial ti-tles

• Have an active working relationships with more than 65,000 pub-lishers

• Provide services to over 50,000 libraries including academic, cor-porate, government and public libraries

It is important to note that vendors have had to develop a significantinfrastructure and they have developed one-to-many relationships withboth their customers and publishers. This will be an important pointlater.

Currently, the standard services that serial vendors supply for printorders include:

• New orders• Invoicing and automation support for invoicing• Order consolidation• Database revisions• Claiming/replacements• Samples• Renewal notices• Cancellations• Support for electronic ordering, claiming, publisher reports and

other Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)• Collection assessment and evaluation reports• Reports (on price inflation, title distribution by country of origin,

where titles are indexed, etc.)• Management of memberships

Serial vendors supply the following standard services to publishers:

• Consolidating payments• Sales data• Marketing (e.g., vendors list titles in systems)

Vendors became partners in the serials distribution process becausethey were able to provide value-added services that reduced the costs ofmanaging serials for both libraries and publishers. Obviously, to stay inbusiness vendors must continue to reduce the costs to libraries for man-aging serials, especially the costs of managing electronic serials. In thepast, the value of a vendor was determined by their ability to provide

Concurrent Sessions 181

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timely and accurate renewals, accurate invoices, quick processing ofclaims, timely and accurate placement of orders, and quality customersupport. Currently, vendors are expected to maintain these serviceswhile providing new services that help libraries achieve similar cost ef-ficiencies for the management of e-journals.

Electronic publishing is changing the current business model. Between1996 and 2001 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Supp-lementary Statistics Reports indicated that reporting libraries increasedtheir expenditures for electronic serials from approximately $15,000,000to over $117,000,000.1 One large serials vendor reports that subscrip-tions for electronic journals now account for nearly 15 percent of theirbusiness.2 Some of vendor services may continue into the digital envi-ronment, but many may no longer be needed. Pushing the developmentof the electronic end of the business to an extreme (e.g., assuming thatnearly all subscriptions are for e-journals) may result in changes in thefollowing services provided by vendors:

• New orders. There will still be a need to support this activity.• Invoicing and automation support for invoicing. If you are paying

one-line invoices, the need for this service is possibly diminished.• Order consolidation. If you are paying one-line invoices for large

groups of customers, the need for this service is possibly diminished.• Database revisions. This activity is useful to maintain library/vendor

records. If there is no vendor, the need for this service is diminished.• Claiming/replacements. This service will no longer be needed.• Samples. This service will no longer be needed.• Renewal notices. If you are working with large packages, the need

for this service is diminished.• Cancellations. If you are working with large packages, the need

for this service is diminished.• Support for electronic ordering, claiming, publisher reports, and

other EDI. There will still be a need to support this activity, but itmay not be vendor-specific.

• Collection assessment and evaluation reports. There will still be aneed to support this activity.

• Reports and projections on price inflation, reports on title distri-bution by country of origin, reports on where titles are indexed. Ifyou are working with large packages, pricing is in the contract andthe need for inflation figures is diminished.

• Management of memberships. There will still be a need to supportthis activity.


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This is a cursory look at potential changes. It is not, however, a realis-tic overview because most likely libraries are going to continue to col-lect some print journals for the foreseeable future. All of the aboveservices will continue to be needed for at least part of the serials collec-tion. At this time my own library spends about 33 percent of its serialsbudget on e-journals, whereas a review of the ARL figures in 2001shows expenditures for electronic serials averaging 23 percent of over-all expenditures for serials.3 There seems to be a leveling off in growthafter a period of extreme growth because many of the big serial publish-ers have already brought their packages to market. One can easily con-clude that e-publishing has not made life simpler by reducing the needto process physical objects. It has done the opposite by layering anotherprocess over the existing ones with a continuing need for both. Man-aging serials is more complex, not less complex, in the current environ-ment. This being the case, what other factors would lead libraries toquestion their business relationships with vendors?

PUBLISHER OR VENDOR–IS THAT THE QUESTION?

Recently, publishers have attempted to have subscriptions for e-onlyjournals placed directly with the publisher and not through serial ven-dors. This pressure from some publishers to move away from the cur-rent business model has been part of the reason that we have to ask thequestion, does my library need a serials vendor? This represents a shiftin the basic business model and this shift has major implications for allstakeholders including libraries, vendors, and other publishers

Many publishers assume they can stop using vendors to aggregatesubscriptions in the electronic environment and that publishers canmanage all accounts directly. Some go so far as to include savings fromthis shift in their business plans. Even when libraries have demandedthat vendors handle the subscriptions, it is important to note that thepublishers will no longer discount these renewal orders to vendors. Pub-lishers are basically looking at a business model for e-journals in whichpackages are marketed and sold directly to libraries and the services ofserial vendors are no longer used. Publishers don’t expect to provide li-braries with the standard services provided by vendors, however, norany additional services.

When looking at the traditional set of services vendors provide librar-ies, there are real reasons why publishers should believe that in the e-publishing environment they can improve their profit margins and re-


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duce the costs of their products to libraries by working directly with li-braries. Because packages are bundled, there is no need for elaborateinvoicing. There is no need for claiming. Renewals of continuing con-tracts are a snap. Customer service is handled directly by their staffwithout a “middleperson.” Cancellations are minimized by contractstipulations and, since there are few transactions, there is no need for ex-pensive technology to handle EDI. Libraries can save the costs of theservice charge and, in some situations, receive a credit from the pub-lisher for going direct. The publisher can save on the commission theyformerly paid to vendors. On the surface this seems to makes sense.

When looked at globally, however, this shift may not be beneficialfor libraries for multiple reasons. Some of the assumptions stated abovemay be erroneous. Some libraries may still need invoicing that can beelectronically posted to individual e-journal titles. Some libraries allo-cate and expend funds at a fairly discrete level and this requires detailedpayment information to chart expenditures against allocations. If librar-ies received one-line invoices for most publisher packages, expendi-tures could not be posted to discrete fund lines without significantmanual intervention by libraries. Without expenses posted at a discretelevel, it is difficult to allocate to individual fund lines and it would notbe possible to monitor price changes and project inflation for fund linesagain without significant manual intervention by libraries. The ability totrack inflation and price changes for individual serial titles could begreatly compromised.

Detailed expenditure information would not be available through theone-line payment process. Subscription agents have invested resourcesin developing the proprietary interfaces needed to load financial datainto a variety of library systems. Publishers won’t do this. Subscriptionagents supply libraries with electronic invoices that allow the posting ofpayments with a minimum of effort. Libraries could change to acceptone-line invoices or adjust internal systems and processes to manuallypost financial information. Increases in local processing costs or a lossof value-added services would have to be weighed against the savingsfrom ordering packages direct from publishers.

If it ever became necessary to dissolve a bundled package, theunbundling process would be very difficult without a history of the ba-sis for the package and its costs. Renegotiation of bundled packageswill become more common given current budgets. Maintaining accu-rate title-level cost records provides a good basis for making decisions ifit becomes necessary to reduce a package. Most libraries belong to a con-sortium. Subscription audits are the basis for creating many consortial


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agreements. The maintenance of accurate subscription records is criti-cal for these audits. Without vendors, this work would have to be as-sumed somewhere, and most consortia and publishers do not have goodsystems for tracking this information.

There are additional reasons why this shift in the e-journal businessmodel may not be good for libraries. The large packages from a fewpublishers would represent the bulk of the shift to vendorless transac-tions. The packages from a handful of publishers probably represent thebulk of the electronic serial expenditures reported by ARL libraries, butin all likelihood the actual number of subscriptions represented by thepackages is much smaller. My local experience is that the big packagesrepresent 25 percent of the dollar value of serials budget, but only 5 per-cent of the total subscriptions. Removing the orders for these packagesfrom the mix means that the costs/service charges for the remainder ofour subscriptions aggregated with serials vendors increase signifi-cantly. Essentially, we would be removing 25 percent of the dollar valuefrom the account but leaving 95 percent of the work. The revenues forserial vendors are derived from the service charges levied customers,and from discounts received from publishers. Not all publishers cansupply discounts, but the largest of these discounts have historicallycome from the larger publishers. In a direct marketing plan, these reve-nues are no longer part of the equation, and this will squeeze vendorsand inevitably raise costs for libraries. Increased costs would have to beoffset by reduced costs from the direct packages.

WHAT WOULD NEED TO BE DONEIN A WORLD WITHOUT VENDORS?

In a digital environment, some work such as claiming and replacingmissing copies goes away, but other tasks such as basic financial pro-cesses will remain. It doesn’t matter if a subscription is online or on pa-per, the publishers still want to be paid. The use of business-to-businesssoftware is becoming more common, but only the largest publishers areable to conduct a large portion of their business directly online with li-braries. Smaller publishers don’t have the resources needed to imple-ment EDI to conduct their business. The parent organizations for mostlibraries do not have solid e-business systems in place to support serialpurchasing activities.

In the past, subscription agents reduced the amount of checks thathad to be cut, reduced the proofs of payments that had to be reproduced,


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and vendors made payments in foreign currencies. If direct purchaseplans become the norm, local processing of financial transactions willincrease and in many cases this will increase internal costs. My univer-sity isn’t able to conduct much of its business in an electronic environ-ment and it costs the central accounts payable unit $50-$100 to cut acheck. It requires just about the same amount of effort and internal coststo produce a proof-of-payment voucher. My business office would notbe pleased if I informed them that the library was changing its modeland would now need to have the office cut an additional x,xxx checksper year with 10 percent of the checks paid in a foreign currency. Again,the savings achieved by not using a subscription agent would have to beweighed against the increased costs of absorbing some of the requiredprocesses. The situation won’t be the same for all libraries. A small li-brary that may make a few payments to a consortia for serial packagescould save more dollars than a large library that had thousands of sub-scriptions it had to process internally.

Another service that would have to be absorbed locally is serialsmanagement reports. Agents provide their customers with importantpricing and collection development reports. Vendors maintain large da-tabases that allow them to track price changes and to provide compara-tive collection evaluation reports. Agents aggregate a large part of alibrary’s business and are able to provide data and analysis that is usedfor budget allocation and collection assessment efforts. In a publisher-based purchasing model, this data collection and analysis is shifted to li-braries. Data would have to be aggregated from several disparatesources to derive good expenditure, and collection management reports.Given the opportunity to reduce costs, this may be a trade off that is ac-ceptable to some, but may not be feasible for others.

NEW SERVICE ROLES FOR SERIAL VENDORS

The traditional roles of vendors are changing and it is certain thatsome of their services will no longer be needed in the future. If publish-ers can make a case that the value-added services of vendors are no lon-ger needed and that the savings garnered by ordering packages directlyfrom publishers are greater than the additional costs incurred by a li-brary, the publisher/vendor/library business model will change. Giventhis scenario, if vendors remain totally reliant on old service models, itis appropriate to question their future. The required services will dimin-ish and revenue will diminish as well. Given tight margins, the financial


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viability of the business model would be doubtful. There may be somevendors who choose not to modify their service base but there will be oth-ers that will look upon changes in the publishing industry as opportunitiesto bring new services to market to replace those that will disappear. Thevendors who make changes will probably survive or even thrive.

Commercial systems to manage most processes that involve purchas-ing electronic journals are nearly non-existent. This lack impacts librar-ies, users, vendors and publishers. Not having the tools to make theprocess work smoothly forces the participants to approach the processon an ad hoc basis, and to work on solutions to problems as they go. Thisis not cost-effective. Serial vendors are well positioned to bring systemsand processes to market that could help manage e-journals. Vendors areable to bring additional features to management systems due to their re-lationships with publishers and the databases they have built as part oftheir business.

The management processes for e-journals could include:

• Acquisitions, including product identification, trials, terms, licens-ing, and order fulfillment

• Access, including registration, creation of bibliographic andmetadata, linking and notification

• Account administration, including managing user IDs, passwords,IP addresses; managing content (titles added to or falling out ofpackages); providing pertinent information to users

• Problem resolution, including identifying and resolving accessproblems

• Renewals, including evaluation of use statistics and problem logsand cost benefit analysis

Serial vendors are in a position to use their current business infra-structure to build new services to manage serials in an electronic envi-ronment. Their databases of publisher information contain most of theinformation needed to support the process. They have gathered hugeamounts of information on titles. Is the online free with print or is there asurcharge? Is a license required? If a license is required where can I geta copy? Who would it be returned to? Does the publisher work withconsortia? Vendors’ experience in building systems to move data be-tween systems will also add value. Other aspects could include:

• Bibliographic, publisher, and title data available from internal systems• Pricing, license, and registration terms


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• Customer data• Links to publisher’s Web sites to automate registration• Bibliographic and metadata records including holdings information• Links to publishers to automate the troubleshooting process

Serial vendors could use these buildings blocks to provide systemsthat would help customers manage e-journals. These systems couldgather all information needed from publishers concerning standard in-formation required to acquire an e-journal including:

• Bibliographic and metadata information• Stable URLs• License terms• Registration information• Help desk/technical support information

An e-journal or e-resource management system would gather datasuch as customer account information, the customer’s default licensingterms and preferred pricing models, the customer’s requirements forlinking, and the customer’s requirements for public display of the termsfor use; it would combine this data with the above information stored inthe system to streamline the ordering process. The system could thentrack an order from trial, to license completion, to purchase, to accessand linking completion and finally through the renewal process. Thesystem could provide information that streamlines the process and insome cases the system could automate the process. Vendors have thebasic building blocks for these types of systems but it will remain to beseen if they are successful in integrating current data structures and datawarehouses into the data structures and data warehouses that could pro-vide systems for managing e-journals.

Some vendors are pursuing service enhancements like these, but thisis not the only area in which new services are being developed. Theother side of e-journal management deals with access issues involved ine-journal management. Access services include:

• Platforms for aggregating content from multiple publishers• Support for a variety of authentication methods including pass-

word, IP, or proxy servers• Multi-level search engines• Maintenance of URL’s• Providing extended linking or support for services like CrossRef


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• Bibliographic records with correct holdings and URLs• Support for customized search screens and viewing preferences• Aggregated use statistics• Links and management of pay-per-use e-journals or document de-

livery services

Some of these services are available from sources other than sub-scription agents. Serial vendors will not be the only group able to bringthese services to the library community. Serial vendors will be able toaggregate these services with support for licensing and registration andthe service needed to support paper subscriptions to bring a full menu ofpotential services for serials management to libraries. It would be rea-sonable to expect that most services offered by subscription agentswould be priced based on libraries subscribing to the service, and a sin-gle service charge covering all services may be a thing of the past. Li-braries could negotiate those services they needed; economies of scalecould make these services less costly from subscription agents, but thatwould be determined by individual libraries looking at their needs.

CONCLUSION

Business models do change. There is no sense in sticking with one justbecause you are comfortable with it. All the stakeholders in the publisher/vendor/library relationship need to look at what brings value to the relation-ships in the current model, and how needed value-added activities can bemaintained in an environment dominated by electronic publishing. Thebusiness relationship libraries developed with vendors reduced internalcosts for conducting that business. Can a mix be found that supports theremaining paper-based business while integrating new processes for man-aging electronic serials? In an electronic environment claiming will disap-pear, but maintaining links and access will become the new claiming.

There will not be a simple answer to the question, “Do you need anagent any more?” Perhaps the real question might be, “Do you knowwhy you would still need an agent?” With new ways of acquiring elec-tronic publishing via bundled packages or consortial purchases, the an-swer to this question will be varied. Some libraries will continue to needvendors, others may not.

There are many reasons why vendors could continue to be valuedservice providers. They would provide support for financial functions,order management, licensing and registration management, and ac-


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cess management. Detailed invoicing that shows title by title what issubscribed to in a publisher’s package is very important information tohave. Keeping track of subscriptions and payment histories is actuallymore complicated in the electronic environment. When a link to an e-journal fails, it is just as important to be able to provide a subscriptionpayment history. Orders will still need to be placed. There is a need forservices to support the licensing and registration of e-journals andthere is also is need to provide access management.

Yes, libraries have had to pay increased fees to agents to get theseservices, but because of economies of scale, vendors can provide theseservices more cheaply than libraries can through local processes. Whatshould be looked at is the need for the service, and the potential savingsthat could be achieved by removing the vendor from the businessmodel. If savings are significant, and the need for services low, thenvendors aren’t needed. Given the complexity of the publishing trade, Idoubt that there are really many libraries that will be able manage theirserials without the aid of a vendor in the near future.

NOTES

1. Association of Research Libraries, ARL Supplementary Statistics, 2000-01 (Wash-ington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2002), http://www.arl.org/stats/pubpdf/ sup01.pdf, 9 (21 Oct. 2003).

2. Swets Blackwell, Press Release (Nov. 27, 2002), http://www.swetsblackwell.com/press.htm (21 Oct. 2003).

3. Machine-Readable Files of ARL Statistics Data, http://www.arl.org/stats/ arlstat/mrstat.html (27 Oct. 2003).

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Stephen Bosch is Materials Budget, Procurement, and Licensing Librarian, Univer-sity of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.


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Documents

Helping Manage the E-Journal Forest