Letter from the Executive Director, August 2023
Since at least the start of the 20th century, libraries have engaged external partners to help them process orders for subscriptions and material orders. In an era of print catalogs, paper orders, and checks sent in the mail, it was time consuming and burdensome for a large institution to keep track of new products and publications, who was publishing what and when, what the prices were, and how billing was handled. It’s little wonder that a business opportunity was seen in taking over management of these processes, and dozens of companies moved in to serve those needs.
As electronic order processing became the norm in the 1980s and 1990s, the development of X12, the EAN (now GS1) standards, and the publishing industry–specific applications EDIFACT and ONIX all supported the electronic exchange of order processing information. This work continued into the 2000s with data exchange protocols, COUNTER, and SUSHI, as well as maintenance of EDI-related order processing messages for libraries and publishers.
Supporting this community of companies and their collective needs was an association founded in the UK in 1934 (a few years before what was to become NISO was organized), the Association of Subscription Agents. The group supported a variety of initiatives in partnership with other organizations, such as EDItEUR, the ISSN International Centre, ICEDIS, COUNTER, and even NISO, to support subscription-based processing and data management. Unfortunately, the transformations of digital content delivery, the move toward “big deal” consortial sales, and the shrinking economic business margins in this business forced the association to close, and it ceased to exist on July 31, 2015, not long after the demise of Swets Information Services at the end of 2014. Sadly, today, the old ASA website, www.subscription-agents.org (intentionally not a link!), now redirects to a casino website, as it seems all websites that are not maintained eventually do.
It’s no understatement to say that it took decades to bring efficiency to library order processing of traditional books and serials. The process of creating and standardizing was difficult, time consuming, and laborious. With digital data exchange, automated order processing, and a suite of standards to support the work, this process became routine, simple, and incredibly efficient. So efficient, in fact, that the margins were cut drastically. Combined with the shift towards big deals for web-based subscriptions, the business model for many subscription agents began to fail. Over the first decade of the 2000s, the process of negotiating Big Deals became routinized through a series of multi-year renewals, and was scaled through partnerships with consortia. While the process was scaled, it was hardly standardized and efficient, beyond the size of the deal and the number of libraries that were included.
The move toward open access (OA) content was a minor contributor to these shifts but hardly a significant driver of the collapse of the subscription agent business. However, as we’re transitioning the business model that supports the journal publishing industry, we’re now at a different stage.
Two weeks ago, NISO announced the launch of a new initiative to develop best practices for operationalizing OA business processes. Discussions about this project have been ongoing for over a year, as various interests and the scope of the project have been honed. A wide variety of people have recognized the need to develop standardized processes for managing the flow of OA ordering and tracking the expenses.
The research community is complex and overlapping, with many projects receiving funding from multiple sources. The vast majority of scientific papers published in the physical sciences have between three and seven authors. How do OA fees get distributed across the pool of authors? How do those authors ensure they’re in compliance with the mandates of the grants they’ve received? How do funders ensure that their policies are being adhered to? How does the institution track its investments in open content? How are authors and their payments appropriately allocated to the right funding arm of the institution, and how are the various discounts, transformative deals, and subscribe-to-open arrangements applied? In short, who is responsible for what, and how are these payments credited and tracked, and how do we manage the massive amount of necessary data exchange?
The entire ecosystem of order processing and information management was set up around a subscription model in which a library paid for content published by publishers, with the support of a network of intermediaries. As we’ve begun to transform to a new model, where authors pay article processing fees or there is some type of institutional publication subvention (or whatever new models are created to support publication costs), the reality is, we need to develop a new data infrastructure. Many in the community are recognizing how difficult that process is and will become as it continues to grow. This first NISO initiative, to improve the exchange of information to support OA business models, will undoubtedly be just a first step in what will be a significant and long-term project. If you’re interested in joining the initiative announced last month, there is a call for participants. We certainly welcome the community’s involvement!
Hopefully, you all are enjoying a wonderful summer (in the Northern hemisphere!).
Sincerely,
Todd A. Carpenter
Executive Director
