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g Crucially, Smith believes intermediaries must educate libraries and publishers within scholarly publishing as to what they do and how they are evolving alongside the industry. But key roles remain clear. For librarians, the ordering, management
and payment of journals orders via title databases and support services continues, as does the acquisition of domestic and international content. Meanwhile, publishers demand content ordering, customer contact, subscriber verification, order consolidation, renewals, streamlined payments and more, all of which Smith reckons intermediaries amply provide. ‘We are also at the forefront of
technical developments and these services represent the backbone of the library ordering system for journals and packages,’ he says. ‘I suspect that, in many cases, these systems are taken for granted as librarians have had access to them since they started working with libraries.’ ‘However, these systems have to be
supported by a global knowledgebase... and this is an expensive and valuable undertaking which we need to remind librarians and publishers benefits them immensely,’ he adds. For her part, Schneider from
Harrassowitz is certain the role of a more general intermediary is here to stay. She reckons in an industry with myriad players, intermediation will remain important, and as she highlights: ‘Intermediaries provide a service to limit relationships between libraries and publishing houses to one-to- one instead of many-to-many.’ ‘Also, the number of smaller publishers
is growing while the variety of products and models within the major publishing houses is also growing which leads to a need for transparency and analysis,’ she adds. ‘We are being told by major publishers they cannot imagine a big deal with consortia without the support through an intermediary.’ And critically she believes
intermediaries are instrumental to managing the quality of many relationships. For example, ONIX is the international book industry XML-based
6 Research Information February/March 2017
‘‘For librarians, the ordering,
management and payment of
journals orders via title databases and support services continues”
standard used by publishers, aggregators and other supply chain partners to communicate product information. But while defined as a standard, Schneider highlights how it is used in many different variations. ‘We make sure that messages transmitted via this standard are being normalised,’ she says. ‘As [industry] complexity grows, the need for our service seems to be expanding further and further.’
Open access for all? As the relentless transition from print to electronic proceeds and agents diversifies, the additional threat of open access continues to gather momentum. Richard Bennett is commercial director of Hindawi, one of the world’s largest publishers of peer-reviewed, fully open access journals. As he puts it: ‘With the move to open access, there just isn’t a role for the traditional subscription agent as subscription management is simply gone. Articles are freely available, you can put them wherever you want, download them into a repository and do whatever you want with the content,’ he adds.
‘Open access is a slow but significant progression making the core business of subscription agents even more difficult to support.’ Today, open access remains a relatively small proportion of the swathes of serial publications scooped up by libraries but the transition and its impact on subscriptions to traditional journals will influence the future of any subscription agent-related business. Given this, the likes of Harrassowitz and EBSCO are already spotting the opportunities. Smith, from EBSCO, believes
intermediaries are well placed to support open access initiatives, and as more country mandates are enforced around the world and open access content ensues, the need for support will only grow. For him, article processing charges (APCs) offer a clear opportunity. Highlighting a recent report from Jisc
on APCs and subscriptions, he points out how these charges already make up at least 12 per cent of institutions’ journals spend. And as he also points out, a recent University of California-led study – Pay it Forward – concluded that the library journals budgets of how research- intensive North American institutions were showed them unlikely to be able to fund publishing activities through APCs. ‘As debate of APCs continues, a number of recent e-journals package negotiations have included clauses that a percentage, if not all, of articles from a contracting institution be published at no cost to the author,’ he says. ‘As an intermediary, EBSCO can serve a number of roles including contractual and financial arrangements, such as APCs payment.’ And as Smith adds, open access also has to be discoverable to users. ‘Given
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