Commercial pressures upon electronic publishing

There is a tendency for any individual or company that accretes power ultimately to misuse it. In the week before writing this editorial there were two news stories in the UK press which will have concerned all those who value the preservation of freedom of expression and circulation of ideas and information. These were unrelated, but give an indication of the increasing commercial pressures that are impacting upon the publishing and information worlds.

The first of these accounts was of Bill Gates’ admission that the Microsoft Corporation does impose artificial restrictions upon computer manufacturing companies and information providers, which prevent them from promoting or pre-loading Netscape's products or from listing their home page. Many hitherto enthusiasts for the products of the Microsoft Corporation (myself included) will have become increasingly worried by the growing dominance of this company in the PC software market over the last few years and by some of the methods they have been using against potential competitors. The dominance is not merely in one specific area but now encompasses operating systems and environments, applications, and increasingly the firm is moving into information products. As an educator, the attractiveness and relatively low cost of many of the company’s information products – such as the Encarta encyclopaedia have impressed me. However I am equally depressed by the seeming willingness of the many of the latest generation of students to regard it as the mainstay of their information seeking on many subjects. The most disturbing developments have however been in their attempts to undermine the position of the Netscape Navigator Internet browser with their own inferior product Internet Explorer, which could in turn lead to their ultimate control over access to the Internet. Such control would give enormous power to the company in terms of access to dissemination of information worldwide.

Matters came to a head in the first week of March when Gates was forced to admit to a Senate Judiciary Committee enquiry that his company did impose such restrictive practices. The case was adjourned until the end of April implication when further developments are awaited with interest. In the meanwhile the only impact apparent so far has been a substantial fall in the Microsoft share price.

The second news story of attempted media domination was somewhat more blatant than Microsoft’s tactics, and had a satisfying sequel in the same week. In February the Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch is said to have instructed the editors at the publishers Harper Collins (which he owns) to require an author to tone down his comments about the Chinese government in a forthcoming book, or else to cancel its publication. The author concerned was Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, who had been commissioned to write the book East and West due to be published in September and for which he had been given a substantial advance payment. The reason for the instruction was in case the publication should damage Mr Murdoch’s wider media interests in China. In the event the extensive news coverage of the story, coupled with threats by Patten to sue, and by other Harper Collins authors to boycott the firm in future caused Murdoch to back down and apologise (Daily Telegraph 7 March 1998). This appears to have been a victory for free speech against multi-national commercial interests, but the reputation of the publisher concerned has been seriously damaged in the process. One is also left with a suspicion that it may only have been a minor skirmish in what is bound to be a war of attrition.

These two relatively high profile cases are perhaps indicative of a more general trend, although relatively few owners of publishing businesses would resort to the deviousness of Bill Gates or the heavy-handed bullying of Rupert Murdoch. However there are fundamental changes taking place in the structure and ownership of publishing, electronic media, and other information dissemination enterprises, which are tending to alter the balance of economic power between the different parties involved. Publishing is no longer a profession for gentlemen of a literary persuasion (it probably never was). It is now one aspect of a, multimedia business increasingly dominated by multinational conglomerates. Decisions whether to publish, in what format, where the work is to be produced, at what price, and subject to what terms and conditions are now determined almost entirely by issues of profitability. Likewise the work of the librarian is no longer centred upon traditional book and periodical selection skills, so much as the negotiation of terms and husbanding of financial resources.

From the point of view of the library and information professions a more far-reaching development than either the Gates or the Murdoch stories was announced in October 1997 and will not be resolved for several months. This was the proposed merger between the Anglo-Dutch publishing company Reed Elsevier with the Dutch publisher Wolters Kluwer. If the merger is allowed to proceed, the resulting company would become the world's largest publisher of professional, legal and medical literature with assets in the region of £17.5 billion, combined sales of about £5 billion, and operating profits of about £1.2 billion. Because of the scale of the deal, it will require approval by relevant European and American bodies which regulate competition in addition to the shareholders.

The Reed Elsevier group owns Lexis-Nexis, the world's largest on-line information provider, Butterworths, the leading British and Australian legal publisher, Heinemann the educational publisher, 1200 scientific journals including The Lancet, together with a wide range of popular IPC magazines. It is also the parent company of Bowker-Saur the publisher of this journal. Wolters Kluwer is less well known in the UK, but nevertheless owns the leading publisher in the field of tax and commercial law in North America, and Australia, together with legal, medical, business, scientific and educational publishing interests throughout Europe. The rationale behind the merger would be that the businesses are complementary, and that it would enable the new company to move into areas such as financial information and exploit electronic publishing opportunities. It is in that last phrase that there are the most far-reaching implications for the academic library world, both in terms of opportunities and threats.

The advent of electronic journals, and document delivery services, would appear to be the only way in which academic libraries can possibly cope with the ever increasing demands upon their journals budgets. This is both in terms of the increasing numbers of journals published, and their subscription rates, which has been increasing at between 7% and 15% per year. There is widespread agreement that the number of such journals and services will increase dramatically over the next decade. However the potential advantages of electronic formats will be lost if they are merely seen by the publishers as an opportunity for extracting more money out of the consumer.

The proposed Reed Elsevier and Kluwer merger makes obvious commercial sense from the point of view of the publishers concerned, but its scale has begun to alarm many academic librarians, particularly on the Continent. They see the growing power of such publishing conglomerates ultimately enabling them to impose artificially restrictive conditions upon the use of their publications, particularly in electronic formats. This would undermine any potential benefits of the introduction of information technology to the wider scholarly community

University libraries are noticing significant trends as publishers try to erect barriers to the storage and access of information, and present licence agreements for the electronic access to journal titles in which additional fees are requested, document delivery is hindered, and non-cancellation clauses are introduced (Geleijnse, 1997)

The announcement of the proposed merger has acted as a catalyst to a group of Dutch and German University librarians. They have combined together to draw up and circulate by email a draft position paper ‘to define a common policy and formulate some general principles in order to meet the publishers’ strategy with respect to access to electronic journals and licence arrangements’( Geleijnse, 1997). The idea behind the document is to define a framework within which members might agree to form a consortium for the purposes of negotiating licence agreements with the new generation of super-publishers. Also they would seek the benefits of economies of scale in the provision of electronic resources and oppose the imposition of restrictive non-cancellation clauses.

The suggested licensing framework document defines the ideal terms governing the access, use storage and costs of electronic materials, at least from the point of view of the librarian. These would guarantee access to academic staff and students irrespective of their location, and allow fair use of materials for all non-commercial, educational and research purposes. Such a scheme would undoubtedly improve the position of part-time and distance learning students who frequently suffer from the lack of suitable materials available away from their institutions. The proposed licence would include the right to view, download and print materials as many times as required, subject only to national copyright laws. Likewise university libraries would be allowed to transmit copies for non-commercial interlibrary loan purposes, and to archive a copy of any files supplied.

Other proposed licence conditions would prevent academic publishers from restricting the manner and format in which their information could be stored. Libraries would be permitted to store electronic material locally, on central servers, or at the publisher’s server or any combination. If required, publisher’s data may be integrated with existing data. It should be accessible from all computing platforms and networked environments and delivered in file formats already used by the libraries. The confidentiality of users of services together with the rights of the libraries to gather and use management information on use of the products would also be guaranteed by publishers.

Other proposals suggest that electronic delivery should be considered as an integral part of any journal subscription, and ideally would provided without additional cost. Electronic texts should either be available before or at least simultaneously to the printed equivalents, and an additional fee of no more than 7.5% should be payable for delivery in both formats. Likewise those libraries abandoning hard copy in favour of electronic version should pay no more than 80% of the original subscription. Other forms of payment such as flat fee purchasing for exceptionally heavily used titles and pay per view delivery for infrequently used ones might also be possible options.

The suggested licensing terms outlined above represent an ideal from the point of view of the librarians and it is arguable whether they would ever be achievable in the cold commercial world. No doubt the various publisher’s would respond that the development of electronic versions of new and existing products requires substantial investment, which has to be recouped. If information products are going to be of high quality, with trustworthy and worthwhile content, then it is inevitable that someone will have to pay the costs of their compilation. There are plenty of examples of poor quality and low cost publishing over the networks. Likewise the maintenance of parallel print and hard copy editions of titles imposes additional costs, and if too many subscribers cancel the hard copy versions, the whole product may cease to be economically viable. The use of electronic formats also provides opportunities for the widespread copying and misuse of their products. Stringent licensing terms might therefore be essential in order to protect the interests of the publisher and authors. The ultimate licensing terms for such products will probably lay somewhere between the two positions.

An experimental alternative approach to the licensing of electronic information products has been pursued in the UK over the last two years. This involves the issuing of site licences allowing unrestricted access to materials from a publisher on a given campus. The Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI) operated between January 1996 and January 1998 to test the concept of a national site licence. The terms were negotiated by the various Higher Education funding bodies and four academic publishers (Academic Press, Blackwells and the Institute of Physics). The experimental period is now at an end reports of the projects findings supplied and discussions for a successor programme are in progress.

Electronic information formats in one form or another have been with us now for two decades, but it is only in the last few years that they have begun to make a substantial impact upon the overall pattern of publishing and the relationships between publishers and libraries. The changes that are already apparent, or else are on the horizon may be the beginning of a fundamental re-alignment of the respective roles of producers, users, and providers of information products. Perhaps the last six months has given us an indication of a far more