Who Do We Trust? A Vendor Perspective Charleston Conference November 4th, Dean Smith Director, Project MUSE

“Trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community.” --Francis Fukuyama, Trust and the Creation of Prosperity

The evolving trust dynamic between publishers, vendors, and libraries… PackagingCharacteristicsRelationship Dynamics Print-onlyStrength of print brand* Publisher reputation for quality* Circulation Faculty recommendations* Price lists & catalogs Delivery of bound physical object Reliance on a third party Competency Predictable frequency Authenticity/integrity Print/DigitalAccess (ownership vs. lease) Pricing policies Licensing/authorized users Archiving/Preservation Discoverability & usage Depth and breadth Budgets 24/7 communication (1-to-1) Transparency Flexibility Availability Responsiveness Learning together Digital Customization Disaggregation (chapters, articles, snippets) Commentariat (blogs, tweets) Personal brand Crowd-sourced Collaboration Willingness to experiment Facilitation Continuing the dialogue

Questions? What happens to “Sports Guy” is the “community authority” with 90,735 posts since 2003 Who is Sports Guy?

Project MUSE Balances the Interests of Publishers and Libraries  Started as a conversation between a publisher and a librarian  A leading content community in the humanities and social sciences – 460 journals, 118 publishers, libraries  Over $70 million to publishers and more than $80 million in savings to libraries since

From the session abstract… “The currency of both the scholarly publishing industry and academic librarianship is trust.”

Reliability and responsiveness were the most important factors in building and maintaining trust for librarians and publishers MUSE Publishers n=25 MUSE Libraries n=115

MUSE Publishers surveyed value trust over financial arrangements, contract terms, and technical capabilities Trust: 70% Contract Terms: 30% Trust: 52% Technical Capabilities: 48% Trust: 70% Financial: 30%

Comments from Publishers… “Many things are handled through and ftp sites so trusting in your vendor is very crucial.” “We view vendors as innocent until proven guilty. In other words, we give them the benefit of the doubt until they act in such a way that erodes our trust.” “No long term relationship will work without trust.”

MUSE libraries surveyed value favorable financial arrangements, contract terms, and technical capabilities over trust Contract Terms: 56% Trust: 44% Technical Capabilities: 59% Trust: 41% Financial: 58% Trust: 42%

Comments from Librarians… “The contract "trumps" trust in that it is written (at my institution) with consequences should some parts of it not be fulfilled.” “Trust is built on a number of factors: competency, reliability, reputation; to me it's the outcome of a well run business.” “Trust is built over time. An initial relationship with a new vendor is not really based on trust - you do some due diligence but it is partly based on contract and partly leap of faith.”

Questions for Discussion? 1. What is happening to trust in a down economy between publishers/vendors and libraries? 2. Related to shrinking budgets, does delivering high-quality content to end-users matter as much anymore? Is “good enough” okay? 3. How do we establish and maintain trust given the web’s many disguises?