If you are tired of negotiating a license for every commercial information product that you purchase, there may be hope on the horizon.
The NISO Shared E-Resource Understanding Working Group (SERU), co-chaired by Karla Hahn, Association of Research Libraries, and Judy Luther, Informed Strategies, is addressing this issue.
Here is the group’s charge:
The working group is charged with developing Recommended Practices to be used to support a new mechanism for publishers to sell e-resources without licenses if they feel their perception of risk has been adequately addressed by current law and developing norms of behavior.
The document will be an expression of a set of shared understandings of publisher and library expectations regarding the sale of an electronic resource subscription. Negotiation between publisher perspectives and library perspectives will be needed to develop a useful set of practices.
The working group will build on considerable work to identify key elements of a best practices document already begun during a one-day meeting sponsored by ARL, ALPSP, SSP, and SPARC. All of the participants in that scoping meeting expressed a strong desire to continue to work on this project and form the proposed working group to develop best practices.
A recent article provides more details about SERU as does its FAQ.
There is also a mailing list. Send a message to SERUinfo-subscribe@list.niso.org to subscribe.
An update – another article regarding SERU was published in the April 07 issue of Against the Grain, for those that subscribe.