Satisfaction Surveys 2011
Satisfaction Surveys 2011
We would like to thank those of you who responded to the satisfaction survey we ran in February 2011. We have carefully considered your responses and comments and wherever possible, these will be integrated into working practices across our activity. If you did not have the chance to complete the survey, your feedback on any aspect of the company or our services is always welcome. The main issues and how we aim to address them are summarized below:
HE satisfaction survey results, please note that reference to specific publishers or intermediaries have been removed.
Pricing and flexibility
Overwhelmingly, the negotiation of realistic pricing and licence flexibility from publishers and vendors was identified as a top priority.
This is our highest priority and we are continuing to push for the best deals possible, greater flexibility on cancellations, substitutions, and annual opt-outs.
Increasingly, in order to achieve better deals, publishers insist on knowing exactly how many institutions will participate in an Agreement. This means that we will consult with you on several occasions over the coming months, and we thank you in advance for your patience.
Consultation
We aim to assign at least one Licensing Manager to each of the renewal negotiations for NESLi2 or databases. The relevant Licensing Manager will contact each current subscriber about the forthcoming renewal. They will be asking you for information, but also reporting on reporting on progress via either NESLi-REPS or JISC-COLLECTIONS-REPS JISC mail list on at least a monthly basis.
If a final offer appears to be less than satisfactory, we will consult with you before accepting or declining.
Our Electronic Resources Information Group also provides strategic advice on our negotiations.
Timeliness and the communication of Agreements
The survey also highlighted the need to conclude negotiations and make agreements available to libraries as early as possible.
Our target is to make every renewal agreement available at least two months in advance of current database agreements terminating, or by the end of September in the case of NESLi2. However, in some cases, protracted negotiations are necessary to achieve satisfactory results, and in such cases we will always consult with affected subscribers and seek feedback on points under discussion.
Website
We received a great deal of helpful comments about the JISC Collections website and we are undertaking further work to implement many of your suggestions. As part of this development, scheduled for release in August 2011, NESLi2 subscriptions, contract and licence agreements will be shown in your account area, where applicable.
Following your feedback about the NESLi2 reports, we are now sending these as email attachments to lis-nesli-reps. Monthly reports can be found in the ‘My Account’ section of the JISC Collections website.
The JISC Model Licence and licence amendments
We received several comments calling for us to reduce the complexity of licences and for the delivery of machine-readable licences.
We have revised the Model Licence to improve the clarity of the language and to remove unnecessary legalese. We have also made other amendments to ensure that it remains robust and responsive to recent changes in technology. The NESLi2 and dataset Model Licences will be available from our website from August 2011.
We have so far created 55 machine readable licenses. These can be viewed in the Electronic Licence Comparison and Analysis Tool (elcat) and will enable users to compare and contrast different licence agreements and show amendments in an easy to comprehend way. The tool will allow institutions to:
- Easily see what users can and can't do with different electronic resources
- Identify differences between the JISC model licences and specific agreement licences
- Compare different licences with each other
- Download licence expressions for use in library and electronic resource management systems
We are offering a beta version to institutions for testing. We would be delighted if you would take part in testing, please register your interest with our helpdesk.
Resource selection process and your requirements for JISC Collections’ agreements
When asked ‘How might the way in which JISC Collections selects digital content to be licensed be improved?’ responses stated that it is not always clear how content is selected.
Archival content purchased for the community such as the Cambridge Journals Digital Archive is purchased via an EU tender process; and a panel of representatives from Higher Education evaluates tender submissions.
Content for inclusion in JISC Collections’ catalogue for institutional subscription is selected via a Request for Proposal process, where publishers submitted pricing and content proposals for consideration and consultation with the community. However, we have sought to address the supply led nature of this process by establishing a Resource Requirements list where you can state which resources you would like.
We received a number of requests for agreements for e-books and we are in the process of drafting a tender document.
If you would like to volunteer as a marker for submissions, please contact Anna Vernon a.vernon@jisc-collections.ac.uk.
JISC Banding and extending access to additional user groups.
We will be running a series of workshops to explore how the JISC Banding system can be updated and improved. In particular we are keen to explore ideas about how Banding might be extended (where required) to cover access by users in partner organization. We also have some ideas about how the Banding system might be amended to make specialist resources (used by a small number of staff or students) more affordable. JISC Collections is preparing a series of Expert Briefing Notes on topics such as International Campuses, the impact of JISC moving to a subscription model, and NESLi2 savings figures.
In Spring/Summer 2011, JISC Collections ran a series of workshops. A reports from which is enclosed here.
