Perpetual rights and entitlement tracking in Alma DRAFT

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Status

IN PROGRESS

Description

Perpetual rights and entitlement tracking in Alma

Decision summary

Record keeping practices will be determined locally.

Owning group

ERES + @Michelle Polchow

Approver

 

Consulted

Local campus and CDL survey.

Informed

Decision process evolved into a survey of the status quo at campuses and CDL, as well as a professional learning opportunity for ERES members to gain knowledge and offers the potential that at some point in the future, members can advocate for more robust record keeping as time and resources permit.

Decision-making process

 

Priority

High

Target decision date

June 27, 2024

Date decided

[type // to add Date]

Recommendation

The SILS ERES Operations Subteam spent substantial time during the 2023-2024 cycle to develop shared knowledge, familiarity with Alma software functionality, and professional expertise in the area of electronic resources record keeping for perpetual access. The group’s conclusion is at this point, both as a consortia and individual campuses, that this is an aspirational goal to revisit in the future.

 

Impact

Stakeholder group

Impact

Stakeholder group

Impact

Local campuses

Post-cancellation record keeping informs collection development decisions, such as consideration of alternative budget scenarios comparing costs of direct subscription versus inter-library loan. The records document accreditation compliance in support of the long-term preservation of the scholarly record. When vendors agree to license terms requesting that they deposit materials with third-party preservation entities, the terms and titles can be compared to the actual deposits which are tracked by the ISSN International Centre Keepers Registry. This data is critical in order to make informed decisions, monitor vendor compliance, and leverage impactful contracts during a renegotiation process.

CDL

California Digital Library’s Licensed Content Group (LCG) purchases and manages UC systemwide electronic resources by leveraging the collective negotiating power of the UC campuses. Electronic journals represents significant and permanent assets for the University and therefore are an integral term of agreement which CDL advocates for inclusion with every vendor. Without documenting and tracking perpetual access, post-cancellation rights, and title transfer, this can jeopardize the assurance that journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers. Transfer between parties, and monitoring the Transfe Code of Practice ensuring that the process occurs with minimum disruption, journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers, and parties honor perpetual access and post-cancellation access rights. This data is critical in order to make informed decisions, monitor vendor compliance, and leverage impactful contracts during a renegotiation process.

Reasoning

CDL Shared Licensing negotiates a significant portion of the journal collection on behalf of all UC campuses. These licenses determine to what extent these resources have assurance for long-term preservation, post-cancellation access, and mechanisms for ongoing access. Perpetual access (or alternatively, archival) status information supports more complex library campus projects which may include activities such as placing serials in digital storage facilities, repurposing stacks to free up physical space for alternative uses, and electronic journal holdings metadata operationalizes data-driven decision-making. Data also informs gauging long-term access to the digital journals, which is mission critical for libraries, to ensure digital scholarly content in all formats remains available to future users. For instance, if a journal ceases to be published, the archival status guides users to the archiving agency providing long-term access. Archiving agencies operate under a variety of business models, so it is also important that UC considers support and participation in these efforts to sustain access to significant investments made by the libraries. Without operationalizing this data, decisions are made in the dark, jeopardizing the local community users uninterrupted access to content, regardless of whether a subscription continues, or a business or technology fails.

Given UC’s success with the Transformative Agreement for scholarly journal agreements, this shift in the publishing business model requires careful attention to monitor the direction perpetual rights takes for article level metadata. Although UC articles can be made available through Open Access, other articles within the same journal may require subscription. This raises questions as to whether vendors remain faithful to their duties ensuring content is deposited with a third-party preservation entity, or potentiall set up a situation where preferential treatment is given to only content controlled under their copyright authority. It is possible that Open Access publishing will disrupt the long-held practice of inclusion of perpetual access rights terms in the license, as well as dilute fulfilling the obligation to deposit journal content with registered archival keepers. Open Access content may be more vulnerable to disappearing from the long-term scholarly record without examining the comprehensive framework ensuring perpetual access as it co-exists with Transformative Agreements.

Background

Perpetual access, is a mutual obligation libraries and publishers have to ensure long-term preservation of the scholarly record. Agreements between the parties are good places to document these mutual obligations. These might be subscription agreements, open access publishing agreements, or agreements that blend the two. Recent research indicates that in many existing agreements, terms are vague, unclear regarding the precise content and time depth preserved, unnecessarily restrictive in terms of access and/or use, conflated post-cancellation access and long-term digital preservation and access, and were sometimes administratively burdensome to implement. It was also difficult to verify compliance with the agreements, and to determine if the content was actually preserved properly. In 2023, LibLicense Model license recommended improved language and guidance for working this into new agreements.

License categories for post-cancellation access (PCA)
University of Minnesota-Minneapolis executed a retrospective analysis of all licenses and found most agreements could be grouped into the following categories for post-cancellation access (PCA):

  • third-party preservation entities (e.g., Portico)

  • delivered (e.g., jump drive)

  • vendor hosted and some with fees

  • rolling PCA allowed access to the most recent five years of content, so with every year of subscription more and more content would become inaccessible.

    (Sunshine Carter, “The perpetual access rights ‘problem’,” ELUNA Annual Meeting, Spokane, WA, May 3, 2018, https://documents.el-una.org/id/eprint/1706/ (accessed 5 April 2023)

Alma functionality
Facilitates licenses associated with corresponding portfolios. Given local campuses may also license the same journal as CDL, with different coverage dates, this creates a more complex record keeping process. UCSC has developed a workflow distinguishing local access versus CDL coverage.

There may also be cases where a local campus will have a journal portfolio with different date coverage pertaining to two different access types. It is then necessary to have duplicate portfolios with one indicating the perpetual or perpetual and current access and the other with access type none for the coverage dates not covered under perpetual access licensing terms. University of Minnesota-Minneapolis used two different electronic collections for very large sets of journals to group like terms for perpetual access. This was also communicated out to faculty for awareness in selecting course materials with greater potential for sustained long-term access.

Once perpetual access record keeping is undertaken, an necessary prerequisite is to consider is Working with the Community Zone Updates Task List. Once a portfolio or bib record contains perpetual access records (MARC 857), a review of automatic functions needs to be conducted in order to prevent deleting activated resources inadvertently, causing a loss of the record with perpetual access entitlements. This can happen when a journal transfers from one vendor to another. Given the Transfer Code of Practice, participating vendors will honor access to the remaining active subscription, which may move in part or whole during the change over between the transferring publisher and the receiving publisher.

NISO RP-24-2019 Transfer Code of Practice (Version 4.0)
3.4 Perpetual Access
The transferring publisher must ensure continued access to its customers where it has granted
perpetual access rights, even if the transferring publisher will cease to host the online version of the
journal after the effective transfer date. Either the transferring or the receiving publisher, or both,
could fulfill perpetual access obligations. However, all parties (the transferring publisher, receiving
publisher, and journal owner) should consider any perpetual access rights that customers may have
acquired, seek a full understanding of the rights which apply, and ensure that such access is fulfilled.
The Code intentionally does not specify the means or parties to provide such access, but places on the
transferring publisher the responsibility for ensuring that customers to whom it has granted perpetual
access rights will continue to have access post-transfer (see section 6.4).

3.5 Preservation Arrangements
The transferring publisher will alert the receiving publisher to all existing preservation arrangements
for the journal.

Section 6.4 Perpetual Access Information
If the receiving publisher will fulfill perpetual access obligations (see section 3.4), the transferring
publisher will communicate to the receiving publisher where such rights were granted. If the
transferring publisher will continue to fulfill perpetual access obligations, they will ensure that this is
communicated to relevant customers within 4 weeks of signature of the contract or 4 months prior to
the effective transfer date, whichever is the later.

Local UC Campus Practices
Campus Tracking data points for Perpetual Access - survey of local activity. (March 2024). The survey indicated that there are limited human resources available for undertaking such a complex project, both at CDL and for local campuses.

Dependencies

Questions to consider

Issue

 

 

 

Issue

 

 

 

Title transfer

recommend separate decision

 

 

Title changes

recommend separate decision

 

 

CDL Tier 2 changes

future consideration

 

 

Tier 3 perpetual/post Cx access to CDL managed content

future consideration

 

 

CZ bib record reliability on title changes

future consideration

 

 

Perpetual access vs post-cancellation access

future consideration

 

 

IZ/NZ duplication of portfolios in Primo and coverage display

future consideration

 

 

Cross referencing print holdings (local and RLF)

future consideration

 

 

Licensing information cross references

future consideration

 

 

 

Action Log

Action/Point Person

Expected Completion Date

Notes

Status

Action/Point Person

Expected Completion Date

Notes

Status

Tamara Pilko

March 2024

Create survey to record campus efforts

Completed

Michelle Polchow

July 2024

Complete SILS ERES decision

 

 

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