springerlink.com 1 Can Agents Really Deliver on Their Digital Promises? Fourteenth North Carolina Serials Conference, Chapel Hill, NC April 15, 2005 Bob Boissy Manager, Subscription Agent Relations Springer

2 Digital Promises All scholarly journals will be available online All scholarly journals will be interlinked and highly accessible Scholarly journals online will be better than print journals The online environment will be stable The business models will be sustainable The agents will aggregate metadata about online journals, license terms, and pricing The agents will also offer portals and host sites for content

3 Larger publishers want their imprint viewed as a database with both breadth and depth Users now expect volume 1, issue 1 content online Library Consortia want to drive new business models The Open Access movement wants to drive new business models Subscription Agents want to support collection development trends - but what are the trends? Digital Market Forces

4 Digital Desiderata We all need data on which journal issues are available online, and which journal volumes are available to which institutions We are all looking for simpler business models We are all looking for perpetual access guarantees We are all banking on online journals seeing far more use than print journals We are all looking for sustainable ways of making the scholarly record available to users

5 Questions for Agents: Part 1 Are agents over-committed to the print subscription world? Are they hurt by migration to e-journals? Can the agents support Open Access, even if it means lower STM journal prices and commissions? Do agents support the draft standard ONIX for serials, and what do they want publishers to do? Do agents think that programs like LOCKSS which allow local e-journal archiving are worth supporting?

6 Questions for Agents: Part 2 Do agents think licenses between publishers, libraries, and themselves ought to be made public? Would agents favor a system where all subscriptions were billed at list price, with custom license prices serviced through a system of credit balances? Do agents offer the exact same services to publishers that do not provide any commission as to those publishers that do provide a commission?

7 Thank you Bob Boissy Manager, Subscription Agent Relations x-616 or