RLI 282 The State of Large-Publisher Bundles in 2012 17 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC 2013 that they had such a policy now. Respondents’ comments provided some useful perspective: for many institutions, even if the signed license states that nondisclosure is required, the institution abides by the law of their state, and respondents presumed that open records acts apply. Recent attention surrounding nondisclosure clauses has, however, resulted in an increasing number of institutions that are now in the process of establishing a policy not to sign such clauses. An interesting comparison can be made to data collected for the 2003 survey. In that survey, ARL asked about the legality of licenses with nondisclosure clauses. Twenty-six public institutions reported that they were legal in their jurisdictions, and 20 (77%) of those 26 institutions did accept those clauses, although some reported that they were subject to sunshine laws and FOIA requests.8 A similar percentage of 11 private institution responses was reported. It is encouraging that over this ten-year period, more institutions are attempting to refrain from signing nondisclosure clauses. The second question in the recent survey asked whether nondisclosure clauses were signed for the 2012 contract for specific publishers (Table 4). Depending on the publisher, a range of 10–28% of respondents indicated that they had indeed signed a nondisclosure clause. When comparing the data with that of 2006, it appears that significant progress was made with Wiley and Taylor & Francis, since the percent of nondisclosure dropped by two-thirds and by more than half, respectively. Elsevier decreased slightly, but Springer, however, rose 11%, raising questions as to whether it increased the pressure on libraries to sign nondisclosure after the open-records decision in the state of Washington in 2009.9 Again, the comments for 2012 indicated that some libraries assumed open records laws applied to contract terms. The role of consortia cannot be overstated here, since they negotiate many large bundles on behalf of the libraries. Those consortia that have recently or are now establishing nondisclosure policies will affect the responses to this question in the future. Table 4. Libraries that Reported Signing Nondisclosure Clauses Publisher 2012 Contracts % Nondisclosure 2006 Contracts % Nondisclosure ACS 48 10% N/A N/A Elsevier 47 25% 50 28% Nature 42 19% N/A N/A Sage 43 21% N/A N/A Springer 46 28% 36 17% Taylor & Francis 34 9% 10 20% Wiley 48 21% 61 61% ARL also is supporting model author-rights clauses that provide for open access deposit of works by the institution’s authors. Only a very small number of libraries did attempt to negotiate this clause for 2012 contracts, but of those libraries there are success stories of at least 50% or more for nearly all of the publishers. This should encourage other research libraries to consider adding this clause to their license, and respondent comments indicated that some were expecting to do so in the future.
Previous Page Next Page