FEATURE Subscription Agents
still a long way off in many fields, as research funders are increasingly insisting on open access publication, the movement has undoubtedly gathered pace and cannot be ignored. A lack of subscription agents, however, should not be mistaken for a lack of intermediaries. Mark Carden, organiser of the Researcher to Reader Conference said: ‘There is a notion that if you make scholarly communication free it all just happens by magic, but it doesn’t; it needs people to build systems and standards and have processes that glue it all together, because if you don’t have discovery and reputation and brand going on, then you don’t know what to read and what to trust. There’s a long future for that intermediation, and there’s room for subscription agents. There are plenty of these in niches where they are doing the business with obscure titles – or they are doing work in particular geographic regions and that sort of thing – who will continue to survive.’
This changing nature of intermediation services is reflected in the emergence of the Researcher to Reader conference as a successor to the Association of Subscription Agents annual conference, following the dissolution of the Association of Subscription Agents as one of the knock-on effects from Swets’ bankruptcy. Carden continued: ‘We need to look at all forms of intermediation between the author of the paper and the reader of the paper, and that is what the conference ought to be about. There’s still a problem to be solved; there’s still the issue that there are many many publishers and there are many many libraries, and there is still that bow-tie of order management and claiming that is best handled by an intermediary with good systems. With open access again there are many publishers and many institutions, and someone
should act as an intermediary to do that, but I’m not sure subscription agents are well placed to be the ones doing it.’
The difficulties in building a sustainable business model, where the underlying economics of the system as a whole are in a state of flux, are obvious. Open access comes in many varieties, publishers are developing a wide range of new products, and research funders are increasingly
Good subscription agents need to demonstrate the value they are adding
adding new stipulations. Whether general services are suitable in such a heterogeneous environment, and whether big subscription agents will continue to have a significant role in the long term, is less clear. Powell, however, is undisputedly positive: ‘In the natural order of things, a service only goes away when there is no longer a need. We believe the need for intermediation, while changed from years past, is still very strong. A system without subscription agents would dramatically impact the library workflow. Now, libraries can take advantage of a streamlined acquisition and management process, which we believe increases efficiency and decreases their overall costs.’
A bright future?
If subscription agents, including the big ones, are to have a positive future then they need not only to add value, but be recognised for the value that they add to the information system as a whole. The value for an individual library from a well run subscription agent is often less
apparent than the cost, and like any good part of an organisation’s infrastructure, it only becomes apparent when things go wrong. My own experience of working at a poorly run subscription agent over a decade ago, leaves me under no illusions about how wrong it is possible for a subscription agent to get it – but also the huge potential from a well-run service. Good subscription agents need to demonstrate the value they are adding, and libraries need to be more willing to pay for the best value and not just the cheapest. It is also important to remember, however, that subscription agents add value to the system as a whole, rather than just to individual organisations. They have a role in rebalancing the journal market away from the dominance of the big publishers, potentially making it as easy to subscribe to a journal from an obscure publishing house as a publishing conglomerate.
If we take a step back from subscription agents, and look at the role of intermediation more generally, then the picture is far more positive. The potential for intermediation is undoubtedly expanding, as there is a need for a far greater variety of tools and services to ease the transfer of traditional forms of publication, especially as new forms of open access are joined by open data, open code, and new forms of enhanced publication. The exact details of this intermediation are still being worked out in the creative-destruction of the marketplace. One thing is clear however: the information ecosystem is much more complex than it ever used to be, and with it comes a need for more intermediaries – not less.
The Research to Reader conference will be held in London on 15 and 16 February. Visit http://r2rconf. com/registration/ for more information.
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