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YMPATHY for agents and brokers is sometimes rare, and the value they provide can be hidden by the way they are paid.
For university librarians the subscription agent appears to be one worth saving.
“Libraries really value their subscriptions agents,” Gavin says, “and my Tender Working Party agree that handling that role themselves would necessitate adding at least one FTE to their library staff, more at research-intensive institutions. This is unattractive as the costs involved would be many times what an agent would charge.”
What do they do?
Gavin says: “Subscription agents handle the relationship between hundreds of institutions on one hand, and thousands of publishers on the other. They work in the middle and triage those relationships via a single route. So, if you’re a librarian you don’t have to manage a relationship with every single publisher you deal with, and similarly the publisher doesn’t have to manage a relationship with every single library that takes their content. “We’re only really looking at a handful of agents, there are some local agents who work in different territories but looking globally there’s not many. There have been others in the past that have not survived, such as Swets. Right now EBSCO has about 75 per cent of the UK
The impact of OA in the UK will continue. When you look globally, the UK is ahead of the curve on open access publishing for research.
Evolution of OA unsettles vital relationships
As publishers change their business models to incorporate Open Access, an important part of the ecosystem is threatened. It may be the job of buyers to save it, says Gavin Phillips, Category Manager, Academic Services, for Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC).
market, but we’re also looking at Prenax and Otto Harrassowitz.
What is the problem?
“The work of agents is covered by a small publisher margin and a small fee charged to customers based on total subscrip- tion spend,” Gavin says, “and this agent revenue has reduced as publishers have squeezed their margin and customers have spent less via agents.
“The shift to Open Access publishing has seen Transformational Agreements negotiated with big publishers, who have consequently reviewed the way transac- tions are handled. Though some publish- ers remain agent-friendly, others have not and this has reduced spend via agents by around 25 per cent since 2018.”
The effect “If there’s a worst-case scenario, it’s that having no agents creates huge amounts of duplicated work across the sector for both libraries and procurement teams. This would be the case if we lost agents altogether, but also if agents are forced to work without a framework agree- ment. Institutions spend an awful lot on subscriptions, some spend multi-millions of pounds a year, and if they are a public sector body they need to make sure that’s done in a compliant way. With no frame- work, that means they will be doing their own tender process from scratch and if all universities start doing that, there’s a huge duplication of work for them, and a huge duplication for suppliers as well.”
Gavin Phillips. No going back
“Open Access means that publishers are behaving in a different way,” Gavin says. “This has led to some either cutting agents out all together, or making the business unattractive by not allowing them a margin. That’s a problem as the financial incentive for agents comes partly from publisher margins (which are decreasing), and partly from charg- ing libraries a fee based on their overall annual spend (which are also decreasing). This trend is likely to continue, making agent services very challenging to deliver in the way libraries are used to.”
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