What does consortia licensing and agreements involve?
The business in electronic environment is conducted through licenses and agreements. The publishers use licensing as a legal method for controlling the use of their products and services since technology and legislation are still evolving and the existing copyright provisions are inadequate to tackle access issues. Most e-resource subscriptions require libraries and library consortia to execute a license agreement as part of the consortial contract with their publishers or aggregators. It is critically important to ensure that all issues concerning consortia licensing of e-content and particularly the licensing terms that go into publisher / vendors’ licensing agreements are reviewed and understood thoroughly by the consortia negotiation committee and the agreement signing authorities. Since it is practically impossible to enforce all the publishers to agree for a common model of licensing agreement, it is desirable to provide the publishers / vendors a checklist of must-be-present ter
