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agent does,’ he says. ‘Indeed, if I was at an institution, I would want a strong in-house scholarly communications department to do this. But if I was working for a library I would quite like to have an organisation handle all of my billing and ordering problems, so there is still a role for outsourced order management.’ Order management role or not, the
thorny issue of payment exists. Carden believes that many libraries have grown accustomed to the notion that subscription agent services are free: ‘Libraries’ procurement processes are also designed to drive down prices rather than drive service up. Opportunities exist but they will only work if libraries will pay for them.’
Hindawi’s Bennett also believes libraries g
this, EBSCO indexes all open access titles included in the Directory of Open Access Journals and we are second only to Google as the second biggest driver of traffic to open access articles,’ he claims. In a similar vein, Harrassowitz is also
confident agents can provide services to manage open access. As Schneider emphasises: ‘We are not selling products anymore, we rather sell our service and this change of role has helped us to better understand our business in general. It doesn’t really matter whether there is a price tag to a product or not, as with open access publications, it is the service that we are being paid for.’ But what does the open access publisher think? Bennett believes gold open access, with its associated article processing charges, does indeed hold opportunities for agents, but he claims to have not yet seen any real action here yet. ‘The thing that institutions are struggling with is the complexity of the management of gold open access but I haven’t seen anyone significantly move into this space from a subscription agent place,’ he says. ‘There’s probably an opportunity here but I see Jisc getting involved and it does seem like the funders and infrastructure providers are stepping up to the role. Certainly somebody has to move into this space, as institutions are employing more and more people for what is an increasingly complex area.’ Open access and APCs aside, Mark
Carden is adamant that a role for outsourced order management exists, and that this could be fulfilled by the subscription agent: ‘It never made much sense to me that you would outsource your APC management to a subscription agent, it’s not really what the subscription
8 Research Information February/March 2017
would benefit from more support from agents, but points out how budgets simply don’t permit for the payment of this right now. ‘At the same time publishers aren’t willing to give up margins for something they don’t see as a real value-add,’ he says. ‘And so this becomes a difficult place for the subscription agent to live.’
A different perspective But – difficult or not – talk to librarians, and subscription agents feature very much in their businesses. Professor Kevin Smith is dean of libraries at the University of Kansas. Directly after Swets’ bankruptcy in 2014, Smith, then director of copyright and scholarly communication at Duke University, publicly argued for subscription security and the need for libraries to reduce outsourcing to commercial organisations. Today, his arguments remain, but he also highlights how many of his colleagues still rely on subscriptions services. ‘Our subscriptions colleagues tell me that in the online environment here, subscription agents have a major role to play and we lean on them a great deal,’ he says. ‘Here, publishers generally do not provide any kind of customer service, so if we were dealing with publishers directly, life would be difficult. However our subscription agents provide us with this customer service.’ ‘We still negotiate directly with a lot of publishers for packages but we have always done that,’ he adds, ‘so I don’t think the extent to which we are in contact with publishers, versus contact with subscription agents, has actually changed that much.’ Likewise, James Caudwell, responsible
for e-resources subscriptions at Cambridge University Library, highlights how the library relies on several subscription agents, especially for online-
related services: ‘After Swets we didn’t put everything we had with EBSCO, that would have been the easy alternative. Instead we wanted to spread the risk so we spent quite a lot of effort placing orders with more agents.’ According to Caudwell, these agents
are critical in handling the invoicing and renewals processes of his library’s many subscriptions in continental Europe and beyond, as well as foreign language subscriptions. What’s more, as the library takes on more online publications, agent services remain important. By way of example, he highlights how many online publishers from outside the UK and US, have yet to develop adequate network access and authentication offerings. ‘We’ve experienced unhelpful models,
were IP ranges are offered to a certain number for a certain price and if you require more IPs, you pay more money,’ he says. ‘This is ridiculous as we can’t offer journals access on just, say, 20 machines at the university. Clearly an opportunity exists for agents to work with publishers on gaining IP recognition across an entire campus.’ Crucially, according to Caudwell, post-
Swets, his dealings with subscription agents are now more secure: ‘We have had different problems with transparency
“The additional threat of open access continues to gather momentum”
over charging and it’s has been an uphill struggle to see this [information] on invoices, but we’re happy now.’ Smith, from Kansas University, believes that subscription agents haven’t made significant changes on security post- Swets, but that bankruptcy concerns have diminished, with fewer players in this space. And he says such agents are here to stay: ‘Even in a world of all open access – which I don’t see happening that soon – there will be a need for some kind of intermediary,’ he says. ‘We have been using middlemen to support the consumption of knowledge resources [in traditional publishing], and we will probably need that support in the production of knowledge resources [in open access].’ ‘It is a very common aspiration in
the academic world that we spend more money on production rather than consumption,’ he adds. ‘But it’s going to be more efficient to have an intermediary here, than not.’
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