Licensing and Managing Electronic Resources

This book is aimed at librarians who have to negotiate digital licences with electronic information suppliers. It comprises seven chapters, together with a model licence (which is analysed in depth in the chapters), together with other short appendices, an extremely brief reference list and a very basic index. There already are a number of excellent books on this topic, including Leslie Harris' Licensing Digital Content, and Fiona Durrant's Negotiating Licences for Digital Resources. How does this book stack up against its competitors?

The first thing to stress is that book is really rather odd, as it is published by a British publisher, but is written by someone from the USA for a US readership. The legal background, the economic and social background and the spelling (“license” rather than “licence”) are all US‐focused. Nothing wrong with that as such, but it means the book is only of value to those who work under US copyright law.

Furthermore, the book is aimed purely at academic librarians – there is little or no advice for corporate librarians here – and only covers licences for electronic journals. There is no mention of licences for e books, for software, for multimedia products. Furthermore, the book fails to discuss practical negotiating skills (simply referring readers to one book, which, it claims, is sufficient for this side of things), the time taken to complete negotiations or who should do the negotiations. It fails to mention special types of licence such as Open Source or Creative Commons. The book mentions, but fails to discuss the legality of, so‐called “adhesion contracts”, that is to say, contracts that come bundled in with a product where you have no say in the terms of the licence. The book recommends forms of wording for particular clauses, but fails to discuss what happens if the rights owner refuses to agree with them. One clause that could be in a licence, but is not mentioned in the book, is the Publisher's warranty that the information is legal, i.e. it does not break laws such as that of defamation. Many publishers are prepared to offer such a warranty, so it is surprising this was not suggested. The author fails to discuss the pros and cons of licences which end at a fixed date versus those that involve automatic renewal. In short, this is a book with an extremely limited scope.

Despite these limitations, what the book has to say is eminently sensible. Unlike its major competitors, it goes into sufficient detail regarding the wording of clauses to make clear why the wording is important. It therefore complements the other books. Indeed, much of the advice applies irrespective of what country you are working in, or what type of organisation you work for; the problem is that the author does not make it clear where her advice is more generally applicable and when it is specific to US higher education full text journal subscriptions negotiations.

This book is recommended to US staff working in the higher education sector and who have to negotiate full text journal licences. For everyone else, this is a nice to have rather than a must have book and if used, its limitations should be borne in mind.