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4.33. Of these barriers, researchers and others find the lack of licensed access, and a requirement to pay for access to individual items, by far the most irksome. Thus for the purposes of this report, we focus on access and usability free at the point of use. The point was well put by Antonio Panizzi, the future Principal Librarian of the British Museum Library (now the British Library) in 1836:
‘a poor student [should] have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry, as the richest man in the Kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect’[1]
Levels of access by sector
4.34. Higher Education. Access to journals in the HE sector is provided primarily through licences negotiated with seventeen major publishers and a further twenty-two smaller publishers under the National Electronic Site Licensing (NESLi2) initiative administered by JISC Collections.[2] Together those licences cover around 8,000 of the major online journals; and they enable universities to subscribe at discounted prices to titles that were not formerly in their portfolios. Universities decide whether or not to subscribe to licences under the initiative, and the costs to each institution vary according to its size and also to its historic level of expenditure with particular publishers in the past. Some universities still subscribe to their own selection of titles, outside the NESLi2 initiative; and for publishers not covered by the initiative, universities have to negotiate individual deals.
4.35. The ‘opt-in’ system inherent in the NESLi2 initiative means that individual universities are in control of decisions about the scope of their collections, and their expenditure. Since the end of the Pilot Site Licensing Initiative in 1998, there has been no attempt at a licence covering the whole HE sector in the UK and funded by top-slicing of funds that would otherwise be distributed to individual universities.[3] There are thus considerable differences in the numbers of publications accessible to staff and students in different institutions.
4.36. Current levels of access in the UK are difficult to calculate precisely. But it is clear that researchers and other members of large research-intensive universities and major research institutions (including research-intensive companies in the commercial sector) enjoy the highest levels of access to journal contents. For members of smaller and less-research-intensive institutions, levels of access are considerably lower. Nevertheless, a recent study found that over 93% of researchers drawn from across UK universities and colleges said that they had easy
- ↑ Cited in Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, pp296-7.
- ↑ For a description of the NESLI2 initiative, see http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/nesli2/
- ↑ There have been recent moves to implement licences that provide access to staff and students in a range of institutions, notably in Scotland under the SHEDL initiative. See Section 7 below.
