Perpetual rights and entitlement tracking in Alma DRAFT

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Legend: not started IN PROGRESS STALLED decided

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.

• Slides and case studies were shared for educational purposes and to facilitate discussion. PowerPoint presentations can be found in the folder in SILS Google Drive labeled Perpetual Rights Tracking). Discussion and background can be found in minutes at the following meetings:

  • February 15, 2024;

  • April 11, 2024;

  • April 25, 2024
    
    

• The group completed a survey regarding campus activities supporting perpetual access -https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1vRHDD4OSeFD1Am2n8af1fezBhL47dPht Campuses expressed a common barrier to executing this type of work stems from insufficient staffing available to make this a higher technical services priority.
  
  

• CDL data available to support campuses perpetual rights tracking for Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 acquisitions.

  • Redacted licenses: https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/resources/redacted-license-agreements/

  • Transferred titles: https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/resources/transferred-journals-titles/

  • Title list: https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/resources/publisher-package-details-title-lists-at-time-of-renewal/

  • There are cases, where resources have not been kept up to date, perhaps as a result of a change in legacy practices following the July 2021 UC Library Network migration.

Impact

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

• CDL Shared Collections in the NZ Project Team

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ow1tmaNlebYVpFBhrLbPuMnz0qkEVO5PGbGCp78KSY0/edit?usp=sharing

Questions to consider

Action Log