Sharing of E-resource Licensing Information across UC

See Best Practices for Decision Pages and Tags for groups

Legend: not started IN PROGRESS STALLED decided

Background

Phase 4 delegated work plan deliverable:
Create a shared storage space where the entire license documents for UC Tier 1-3 e-resource licenses can reside, so that we can compare terms obtained previously within the system. It would be of additional benefit to share information about ongoing license negotiations, as well as those that have failed and reasons why.

• CDL has already implemented the display of Tier 1/2 license terms in Primo. For discussion here, license terms are different from sharing the full legal agreement.

• There is no collective project to display Tier 3 license terms – this may be locally determined as campuses are at different phases of their implementation and familiarity with Alma Licensing. Again sharing license terms in Primo is very different from a select group of librarians sharing full license agreements.

• Tier 3 - need to distinguish between Tier 3 acquisitions that are linked to a Tier 1 agreement (i.e. adding a Taylor & Francis title using an addendum that is linked to Tier 1 agreement - Assisted Tier 3s). Also there are local resources with potential to roll up to a Tier 1 or 2 acquisition, or small specialized database of interest to only one campus.

• E-resources team assumes that the project to display license terms is a different discussion than actually uploading license documents for sharing

• To date, the only existing UCLAS group associated with this type of work is the CDL Licensing Liaisons, which exists outside of the SILS structure. Given the CDL website has no record of group activity, this may be outside the scope of the Licensing Liaisons, and an alternative structure may be forming a CKG for this work.

• This issue has been discussed by several campus represented committees involving both SILS Phase 4 and SILS Operations. Phase 4 work item initiated by TSELG, where it was then shared with AFEG who reviewed and responded. TSELG also sent request for comment to SCLG. AEFG did not include this deliverable in its licensing-related hand off items to SILS Operations. TSELG included this in their hand off as a high priority for SILS Operations.

Open

Licensing - AEFG Document
AEFG Response to TSELG

TSELG roster - former group of local campus representatives interested in leveraging multi-campus discounts for existing acquisitions
Delegated deliverable: TSELG was aSILS Phase 4 escalation group for Alma migration areas which included acquisitions, e-resources, cataloging, metadata, and discovery.

SCLG roster - CDL vertical of authority, focused on licensing new content
Focus: SCLG is the UC Libraries advisory group for decision-making related to UC-wide collection development and management.

ERES roster - Operations team with campus representation.
Approached this deliverable from the framework that campus representatives are closest to the local work and familiar with current priorities. Concluded that campuses do not have extra capacity to perform detailed overlap analysis of locally licensed resources across the UC and request CDL take on the work of initiating new multi-campus negotiations under Tier 1 or Tier 2 licenses. This would require a higher level of administration to facilitate additional resources or re-prioritization of current resources.

Recommendations

CENTRAL REPOSITORY

After discussion on June 2, 2022, the ERES Subteam questions the true benefit of a central repository for Tier 3 licenses.

• We do not recommend that the entire UC Library System store all their licenses in the same drive

• Some pitfalls discussed included the fact that campuses may not be able to accurately locate the license of another campus that would meet their needs or find the part of said license without the guidance of the owning campuses staff. Licenses are living document, may be retired or amended and have complex succession tied to multiple products.

• A central repository would also require significant bandwidth from campuses to move and rename licenses according to new naming conventions.

• If redaction was desired, that would create additional work for campuses.

• The team understands that the CDL Redacted License Agreements website (https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/resources/redacted-license-agreements/ ) serves as the central repository for Tier 1 and 2 agreements.

Questions to consider

• Are there legal issues with sharing specific negotiated license terms among campuses? Need to find out legal ramifications, if any. If necessary to invoke CA Public Records Act - outline that process of having a formal record on file prior to sharing documents.

• Are there legal issues to sharing actual license documents to parties that are not named in Tier 3 contracts?

• Would it suffice to share only Alma license terms and not actual documents? This deliverable examined the situation as a need to share the entire legal agreement between campuses and CDL.

• We need to clarify UCOP’s position, which should provide a baseline for consensus among other signing authorities at the individual campuses about what they can and cannot share from their Tier 3 licenses as well

• Best practices: the importance of campuses using The Regents of the University of California, for [Campus] as the Licensee for their local agreements. Prospectively this will solve issue of sharing.

• Best practices: campuses should not include confidentiality clauses that pertain to the terms and conditions of the agreement, per UC policy. Clauses pertaining to confidentiality of proprietary information may be acceptable.

COMMUNICATION

Perhaps end goal might be better met to focus on facilitating communication around licensing; leverage a listserv or other shared platform for licensing dialogue. Increased communication around terms negotiations, pricing, wording in licenses, advocacy with licenses (ADA, etc). Although there is an existing group called the CDL Licensing Liaisons, this may or may not be the target group to be tasked with this deliverable, which would also include project prioritization in coordination with CDL and allocation of staffing resources to use this pathway to achieve the goal of sharing licenses across the UC.

• Review UC documentation/website in support of new librarians understanding the cross-campus community/eco-system of licensing as a whole. Make listserv information centrally available for new licensing librarians to discover their colleagues.

• Current listserv is under publicized and hosted at UC Davis rather than CDL: uclr@ucdavis.edu

• We recommend centralizing communication about licensing through Slack Community channel (or similar)

• We recommend adding interested non-Technical Services staff (including liaison librarians and administrators)

Questions to consider

• Who should be included in a Slack channel or listserv

• Should listserv be hosted by CDL Shared Collections?

COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

Additionally, if SCLG, or another group would like a review of all or specific Tier 3 vendors or licenses in order to identify candidates for renegotiated Tier 1 or 2 agreements, the ERES Subteam recommends that a project team be established to conduct the review and gather all relevant information.

Impact

Action Log