The inaugural meeting for prospective members of the SafeNet Community Advisory Group took place at the National Railway Museum in York at the end of March. The CAG will provide guidance on community priorities and workflows as the project progresses to assist in the design of a valuable service.

John McColl (RLUK Chair and University Librarian, St Andrews) introduced attendees by outlining the changes that have occurred as the shift from print to electronic journal content has become more prevalent. John spoke of the need for SafeNet within the higher education community as libraries increasingly find that they no longer retain the kind of archival access physical material traditionally gave to readers.

Members of the SafeNet team provided overviews on the origins of SafeNet, project activity and current thinking about several issues in the problem space. Lorraine Estelle (CEO Jisc Collections) gave an insight into the involvement of Jisc Collections and the approaches they will take when negotiating with publishers to create a national archive of content.

In and around these presentations the group engaged in discussions about the project in relation to the community and their experience of the issues. Some of the key talking points are summarised below. The contributions from members of the group will prove valuable in meeting the needs of the community as the project moves forward.

If you would like more information about SafeNet or have an interest in contributing to this group please contact the project team.

SafeNet in general

There was a great deal of enthusiasm for the project with vocal support for a solution to the problem of post cancellation access. The group provided insight into the day-to-day realities of resource management and were unafraid to pose provocative and challenging questions to the project team about larger issues. Discussion roamed around post cancellation access towards related problems that a service based on SafeNet could attempt to address. John McColl stood for the discrete aim of SafeNet, explaining that in trying to address a wide variety of problems it may well achieve nothing. Members of the group agreed that the tight focus of the project was a good thing because it is more likely to succeed in its stated aim.

There was a strong sense from the group that, while SafeNet is undoubtedly a welcome addition to the suite of Jisc library services, they would like to see explicit links with other silo solutions like KB+ and JUSP. This was seen to be very important because, for any new service that requires library data, users do not want to replicate information already held elsewhere.

Core titles, data sources & assertions

Members of the group highlighted that it may be difficult for libraries and publishers to determine which titles were core at what time. This related to a discussion around data sources for populating the Entitlement Registry in SafeNet.

Current thinking around data gathering begins with publisher data then, if that is unavailable, looks to library assertions already held elsewhere (e.g. KB+) before moving to library held data (e.g. catalogues or local records of entitlement). The group felt that there was likely to be a great deal of diversity in relation to how well documented the subscription history of an institution is – in terms of both library and publisher records — and how much effort will be required to retrieve this information.

Participants agreed that while it may be possible to recover historical data through data archaeology the result is certain to be, in some cases, partial and the cost of recovering it very high. Again, this is likely to be the case for both libraries and publishers.

It was agreed that it would be important to separate collection of current subscriptions and renewal data from historical data. The collection and verification of historical information is likely to present a substantial challenge during the early stages of the resulting service.

Future entitlement data should present less of an issue. For future entitlement information SafeNet aims to establish an agreed process with publishers. Entitlement information would be provided by publishers, and possibly fed to multiple places, without the need for library supplied data.

The appropriate copy problem for PCA

Briefly, this refers to the fact that content for a journal can be served by various different providers. For example, current content may be served by the publisher while backfiles are served by an aggregator. Users looking for content from outside the library’s online environment will not necessarily find the appropriate copy.  The route to SafeNet content will be seamless for some users – those in the library environment – but not for others.

It was agreed that this was a common issue which affects various library resources and is unlikely to be something that SafeNet can solve over the lifetime of the project. However, it is something for the project team to consider in relation to proposed workflows and how those reflect real world user interactions.

Two tails – the long and the short of it

In creating a national archive of content the initial intention is for Jisc Collections to approach publishers involved in the NESLi2 deals. The licences for these deals already include clauses on post cancellation access; members of the group agreed that using SafeNet to ensure compliance was a positive step. However, there was concern for publishers not involved in NESLi deals and, in particular, more specialist or foreign publishers with whom libraries have to negotiate post cancellation access themselves.

This reiterates an important aspect of SafeNet: that post cancellation access is a title level problem and a title level concern rather than an issue specific to a publisher or subject area. The group were quick to point out that the content most at risk, and in some cases most important to their users, can be specialised titles from small publishers that comprise the long tail of the problem. However, the publishers involved with NESLi deals provide a promising starting point for SafeNet to build from because of the existing licence clauses.

Next Steps

It is anticipated that the group will meet 3-4 more times over the remainder of the project. Members of the group and additional nominees will also be involved in a separate Entitlement Registry Development Group with a similar frequency of meetings.

An exciting feature of the Jisc Publications Router is the built-in notification system.

As the Router is able to parse publisher data to identify an author’s home institution it can then identify the institutional repository or repositories the output should be deposited in. The postcard notification system will provide anyone who registers with daily updates on new content for repositories they select to track.

Access to the postcard notification system requires a My EDINA account. Once registered you can look up the repository or repositories you’d like to receive notifications for and choose the format for them to appear in:

Sign up for the Router’s postcard notification system at the following URL:

http://broker.edina.ac.uk/cgi/postcard_registration

It is possible to view content already held in the router using the institutional or target repository browse features. Postcards will notify you of any new content added in the future.

Repository managers can use the postcard system to see what content is being provided to the Router for their institution. It is then possible to harvest open access content from the Router or sign up to receive a feed directly into the repository. Transferred content can be added at any stage of the repository workflow; to a specific user profile or the review file as well as the live archive.

For more information about the Jisc Publications Router contact the EDINA Helpdesk at Edina@ed.ac.uk.

Guest post by Lorraine Estelle, CEO of Jisc Collections. Lorraine is Executive Director of Jisc Digital Resources and Divisional CEO of Jisc Collections, overseeing all of Jisc’s digital content and discovery related people, organisations, strategy, services and operations. Among her many successes at Jisc Collections, Lorraine was instrumental in setting up NESLi2 and devising a national consortium with an opt-in model. Lorraine sits on the EDINA management board and has been a member of the SafeNet project team since inception.

I can think of no other asset which an academic institution buys, but to which it has neither physical possession nor a recognised certificate of ownership. Electronic journals are unique in this respect. Academic libraries subscribe, at the cost of millions of pounds each year, to electronic journals under licences that grant them perpetual rights. This system works well providing that the publisher remains in business and the library continues to renew its journal subscription every year.

If an academic library is forced (usually through lack of funds) to cancel a subscription, the problem arises of how its users continue to have online access to the previously acquired journals, given that the content is generally only accessible behind paywalls on publishers’ websites.

Some publishers provide explicit information about such an occurrence and, for example, state that they will make a per-download charge for access to journals post cancellation. These proposed charges are the equivalent to around 1/10th of the current subscription charge. Other publishers are silent on this issue, meaning that a library cancelling a subscription would be required to enter into a negotiation with the publisher to agree an affordable access fee.

This situation is further complicated because an institution will typically only have perpetual rights to some of the journal titles in each publisher’s collection. In order to gain access, the library must claim its rights to the issues of journal titles to which it historically subscribed. The Entitlement Registry project run by Jisc Collections in 2011, demonstrated how complex and time consuming these claims can be. Very often, library records and publishers’ records of entitlement do not agree. This is exacerbated when the publication of a journal title has transferred from one publisher to another, or when one publisher has acquired another and entitlement records are kept on different and often out-of-date legacy systems.

It is this messy landscape which the SafeNet project seeks to address, by building a nationally managed digital archive of journal content and a registry of entitlement. It will provide access to those UK academic institutions which have bought perpetual rights, following a number of trigger events, one of which is post-cancellation access.

Some may question why a national solution is required when global digital and archival solutions already exist. There are indeed some excellent technical solutions, but none quite meets the needs of UK academic institutions in the way that SafeNet will.  One such solution requires payment of annual fees (which may be unaffordable in an economic environment which forces the need to cancel journal subscriptions). CLOCKSS is a successful global solution, but one which does not allow for post-cancellation access. LOCKSS is another excellent solution, but one which is arduous for libraries to maintain. None of these solutions provides a registry of entitlement.

Our vision for SafeNet is that it will be a highly dependable and robust part of the national academic infrastructure. It will be a challenging project, not only from the technical perspective, but because publishers will be required to agree that SafeNet can load and preserve their content. The project team will need to advocate that a national academic archival solution is necessary to safeguard continued access to the journal content purchased by UK libraries. We will need to demonstrate to publishers that there is customer demand for such a service; and that the technical and governance structures of SafeNet will ensure access to each issue of a journal is only ever given to users in institutions that paid for it.

A challenging project but an essential one! The financial future is difficult to predict and a safety net is required in the event of severe economic pressures that would force UK academic libraries to cancel journal subscriptions. Jisc working with EDINA as trusted, non-commercial organisations are well placed to safe guard the scholarly content in which academic libraries have so heavily invested.