You Mean There’s A Way Around This License?
Posted by Tim on 25 September, 2007 in Products and Services
The bane of many a collection development or acquisitions librarian’s existence is the myriad licenses required for acquiring electronic resources. Cooperative arrangements, like those available through SOLINET for many resources, can help ease the burden, but couldn’t there be an even easier way?
Enter SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding. SERU is a NISO-related recommended practice existing today in draft form and in trial use by a number of libraries, consortia, and publishers. The idea is that libraries and publishers have a long history of cooperation upon which alternatives to license agreements can be built to ease the burden of licensing for all involved. SERU is a set of statements of common understanding that address the same issues license agreements typically cover but with an emphasis on widely accepted practices and expectations rather than legalese. The statements express best practices and, it is hoped, can be adopted as a framework for agreement on such common (and commonly contentious) license terms as the definition of authorized users, use and inappropriate use of subscribed content, and archiving and perpetual access. SOLINET publishing partner BioOne is one of the first adopters of SERU in its trial use phase, which runs through December 20, 2007.
Is SERU a license? No. Can SERU be used by all libraries and all publishers in every situation? Probably not, but the exploration of alternatives to what has become “traditional” licensing for libraries could be well worth the effort.
For more information on SERU contact SOLINET at pmd@solinet.net or visit the NISO SERU Work Group’s home page at http://www.niso.org/committees/SERU.
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