ANKOS and Its Dealings with Vendors

 

by Phyllis L. Erdogan* and Bulent Karasozen**

 

The Turkish academic library community entered a new era with the creation in May 2001 of the Anatolian University Libraries Consortium.  Known by its Turkish acronym ANKOS, the consortium’s development has been documented by two members of its steering committee.1 In that article is to be found a complete list of licensed databases since the first ANKOS contracts in 2002 including those signed for 2004.  The present article will bring the reader up to date on ANKOS work for 2005 and onward.

BACKGROUND

A revision of the University Law in 1981 brought all post-secondary education into the university system, provided for an increase in the number of state universities, and following a change in the Turkish Constitution, permitted private higher education on the condition that such institutions be non-profit and that their students be admitted acccording to the national policy of numerus clausus whereby all candidates to enter higher education are subject to a central entrance examination and placed in a specific university department according to the results. Since the passage of that law, 24 universities and two vocational schools at post-secondary level have been opened by

private foundations.  Another 31 universities and two institutes of technology have

been opened by the State.  These, together with the 19 institutions dating from prior to

 

 

*Member of ANKOS Steering Committee and Library Director, Bilkent University, 06800 Ankara, Turkey  <librdirector@bilkent.edu.tr>.

 

**ANKOS Chairman and Library Director, Middle East Technical University, 06531 Ankara, Turkey

<bulent@metu.edu.tr>.

 

1981, two international universities located in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan operated jointly by their own and Turkish authorities, three military academies, and five universities in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, are all potential members of ANKOS.  Membership is also open, subject to case-by-case decisions, to special (research) libraries.  Participation in at least one ANKOS agreement with a product supplier constitutes membership in ANKOS.

 

Of the 57 institutions created following the 1981 Law, the state universities were often located outside the large metropolitan areas and were without library collections or technological infrastructures.  Not surprisingly, they found it difficult to attract teaching staff and students.  Thus when the National Academic Network and Information Center (ULAKBIM) was close to completing its mission of providing all universities with internet connections, it was time for ANKOS in 2002 to undertake to arrange licenses to provide access to electronic resources for as many institutions as possible.

 

To say that this has been a challenge would be an understatement, given the extreme diversity of conditions of the universities. For example, ANKOS member institutions’ budgets for collection expenditures (books, periodicals, other non-book items and electronic resources) in 2004 varied between $100,000 and $3,000,000.2  Enrollments vary from fewer than 100 to over 50,000.3  English language knowledge of staff and students ranges from almost none (no English preparatory classes and no instruction in English) to institutions where the medium of instruction is English.4  All these institutions need to use resources, but to what extent can they afford them, and how effectively can they be used and by how many users?   These are problems for ANKOS as well as for the libraries in other southern European countries, which greatly affect negotiations with publishers and vendors.  It was in recognition of this communality of problems not so frequently encountered in some other countries, that consortia from Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey banded together to form SELL, the Southern European Libraries Link,5 to discuss mutual problems and approaches to vendors.

 

Added to the problems posed by the range of institutions is the dearth of knowledge of English among librarians and the lack of experience of librarians in negotiating contracts and prices.  Certain firms with which ANKOS has contracts have Turkish agents, which facilitates communications with the members but does not always lead to easier contract negotiations since it means an extra layer to pass through. 

 

GROWTH OF ANKOS

Since its establishment in 2002 ANKOS has grown rapidly both in terms of member libraries and total number of database subscriptions.  The first year ANKOS members had a total of 239 database subscriptions through the consortium; this number increased to 418 in 2003 and 565 in 2004, with an estimated total of 682 for 2005 when all details are finalized for 25 databases: 12 from commercial publishers, nine society publishers, three aggregator databases and one electronic book database.  The average number of member libraries participating in an ANKOS contract increased from 5.4 in 2003 to 7.2 in 2004 and 8.6 in 2005.  This shows that despite insufficient financial resources, Turkish academic and research libraries are still trying to enrich their electronic collections and that saturation level has not yet been reached.  This can be explained in part by the establishment of new universities (the Government has announced that 15 more will be chartered in 2005).  At the same time, probably both as a result of the ANKOS-aided increased access to research publications and funding from the European Union and other foreign sources, the number of research publications emanating from Turkey increased by an average 25% annually between 2002 and 2004.   For the first time the Turkish Scientific and Technical Research Council (TUBITAK)  has also announced significant financial support for research, in the amount of US$400,000 for 2005.

 

Usage statistics for the ANKOS full-text databases have monitored rapid growth: from a total number of full-text downloads of 2 300 000 in 2002 to 6 020 000 in 2003 with similar increases in the figures coming in for 2004.  Only half of the ANKOS publishers furnish COUNTER-compliant statistics, so it is not possible to have comparable statistics among the databases.  To increase awareness and use of the databases, ANKOS arranges several education seminars per year in different areas of the country.  In 2004 user education was given for EBSCOhost, Elsevier Science Direct, IEL, Kluwer, ProQuest, Web of Science and Wiley InterScience.  To overcome the lack of sufficient English of both librarians and users, ANKOS has collaborated with vendors to translate database brochures into Turkish and distribute them to the member libraries.  The first three such Turkish publications were for the American Chemical Society, Elsevier Science Direct, and the Web of Science.  Some of the vendors, for example ProQuest, also make Turkish interfaces available on their websites.  In 2005 ANKOS will concentrate more on evaluating usage statistics and user education, especially during the annual meeting at which vendors come to introduce their products.

 

THE ANKOS MODUS OPERANDI

ANKOS is a voluntary association of academic libraries, together with a few research and special libraries, which operates without a staff other than the nine heads of libraries who form its Steering Committee and members of their staffs who serve as “ANKOS liaisons” for each product or vendor with whom negotiations are undertaken.  A visit to the English website6 will provide information about this strucure and other details.

 

Proposals of products come to the Steering Committee from members and vendors.  If the Steering Committee finds a product worthy of consideration by ANKOS, one of the Committee members is requested to appoint a liaison librarian to arrange for a trial, announce the trial to the ANKOS membership,  receive usage statistics from the vendor at the end of the trial, and collect information about the members’ desires to subscribe to the product.  If there is deemed to be sufficient interest, the liaison person then ensures that the vendor is aware of the ANKOS licensing principles and the Turkish National Site License (TRNSL). The TRNSL is a model license which was developed  by the ANKOS “Licensing Working Group” following a review of many model consortial licenses, with the addition of requirements specific to the Turkish situation such as the necessity of individual invoices and vendor support for user education with Turkish-language materials.  Both the principles and the TRNSL can be consulted on the ANKOS website.  Negotiations of the contract are conducted by the Licensing Working Group together with a member of the Steering Committee.

 

At the same time that the text of the contract is being hammered out, pricing is negotiated, in some cases by the liaison librarian, sometimes by a member of the Steering Committee.  This ambiguity was a subject of discussion at a recent Steering Committee meeting.  As a result it was proposed that the role of the Licensing Working Group should gradually be expanded to include price negotiations, because it was recognized that this is also an area requiring an accumulation of experience and the development of expertise.

 

TRIALING OF DATABASES

Trials of subscribed and proposed databases play an important role in the ANKOS selection process and decisions about continuation of contracts, and they are a preferred practice by vendors and libraries.  ANKOS is offered some 20 trials a year by publishers.  At the end of each trial, the usage statistics are collected by the ANKOS liaison, who also collects the reactions of the trialing libraries.  For 2005, as a result of the trials in 2004, ANKOS made new agreements with SIAM (10 members), JSTOR (10 new members so far in addition to previously subscribed libraries), and Serials Solutions (11 members).  Trials also led to the enlargement of existing consortial agreements: the number of OVID members rose from 15 to 27; Taylor & Francis from 17 to 35; Blackwell Synergy from 26 to 37; and MathSciNet from 15 to 23.  Trials with ALPSP (Association of Learned Professional Society Publishers), BMJ (British Medical Journals), CSA (Cambridge Scientific Abstacts), CAB Abstracts, Economist Intelligence Unit, GeoRef, ISI Emerging Markets,  Safari,  Sage and the World Bank did not result in contracts, either due to prices that the members could not afford or low usage, and in a few cases disagreements about the licensing terms.  Although there were a few attempts at systematic downloading and robot usage during the trials, ANKOS was able to stop such misuse before it endangered the consortium as a whole.

 

 

EXPERIENCES WITH VENDORS

ANKOS licenses in 2004 were with journal publishers (e.g. Cambridge University Press, Elsevier), aggregators such as EBSCOhost and ProQuest, indexing services (including MathSciNet and the ISI Web of  Science), and e-book suppliers. Some of these products had originally been subscribed to jointly by the libraries which subsequently formed ANKOS, and at the beginning the subscriptions continued without the benefit of a license for the consortium.  With the passing years these relationships are gradually being formalized, which we trust is to the benefit of both sides.  During these years our contacts with vendors have shown us that while ANKOS may not be a sophisticated negotiator, in this new library world neither are a number of the firms we deal with.  All of us are groping for the best way to proceed, and mutual goodwill and an open line of communications are the most important factors in reaching results satisfactory to both sides. 

 

Multi-year contracts provide a means for consortia to guarantee a price cap over that period.  In addition, with ANKOS affairs being handled by a group of volunteers who all have full-time library jobs, three-year contracts are looked upon as a way to decrease the workload of  the liaison librarians, the Licensing Working Group and the Steering Committee.  By staggering starting dates there will eventually be fewer contracts to negotiate per year.  The contracts are designed to allow new members to join after the first year, with all member contracts ending together when the original contract term is ended.  The Licensing Working Group is also careful to include in the agreements a clause whereby the supplier guarantees not to rescind the contracts of all ANKOS members for the breach of contract of any single library, with a view especially to protecting the consortium against non-payment by an individual member.

 

As mentioned above, ANKOS is a voluntary association, and despite a great deal of consideration and consultation, no means has been found to establish a legal bond between the members.  In practical terms this means that each member institution signs a license for each product.  It also means that ANKOS cannot collect funds from the members in order to pay a single consortium invoice, which would undoubtedly bring financial advantages apart from the fact that some vendors have refused to consider a deal which required individual invoices for the members. According to Turkish law, the state universities have to spend their budgets for services received within the year; they cannot pay license fees for the next year.  Also, the budgets of the state universities are opened during the year in installments, and the first funds are made available in April.  Sometimes their funds are withheld or diverted by the university administration to other uses. These are among the situations which ANKOS must arrange with the vendors, and the solution to this one is often to employ an intermediary willing to pay the vendor on time and collect from the libraries later, charging a commission. We hope that the payment issues will be resolved by the expected change in regulations which will allow universities to move to a multi-year budgeting system.

 

A modification in ANKOS contracts since 2004 has been the decision to license only electronic access to the sources, leaving the print subscriptions to be sorted out by the individual members who wish to continue receiving them.  This decision was taken in connection with the wish to base contracts not on previous individual print holdings but on the overall consortial holdings and "spend".  It was also a result of the difficulties encountered subsequent to the passing of a new tender law affecting state universities, which requires that the universities call for tenders for the supply of print subscriptions.  Where there is only one possible supplier, the law requires that state universities present a document guaranteeing that the supplier has the exclusive right to market the product in Turkey and an Embassy document (Apostille) certifying the guarantee.

 

PRICING NEGOTIATIONS AND FEE DISTRIBUTION

Cost division models are new for many consortia, and we want to mention three which have been presented at E-ICOLC meetings.  The Swedish consortium BIBSAM and the Finnish consortium FinELib7 have models similar to each other in that they are both based on FTEs and prior fees or, if usage statistics are available, they may be used to identify user groups and their populations.  FinELib uses the same cost division model for all databases subscribed to by the consortium whereas BIBSAM has several models, taking into account the size of the potential user group.  Both groups acknowledge that fee distribution is an ongoing process that needs to be transparent so that member libraries feel that it is fair.  In this connection they have both found it useful to limit the range of costs to members by setting maximum and minimum fees.  As will be seen below, both models have similarities with models applied by ANKOS, although in ANKOS there has not been a conscious setting of upper and lower limits to prices.  The BIBSAM and FinELib use of FTE is also different, in that students and teachers/researchers are weighted differently and according to field of study, whereas in the ANKOS case this was done only for the IEEE agreement.

 

Another cost division model, applied by the Consortium of Academic Libraries of Catalonia, was discussed at length by Lluis Anglada and Nuria Comellas in their 2002 article.8   This model is based on "dimensions or characteristics" of the institutions and the cost of their print holdings.  They emphasize the difference in teaching between universities in the USA, UK and Northern Europe and those in the southern European countries, where the traditional method of large classes and lecture notes is also the case for the majority of Turkish universities.  They also criticize the definition of FTE as used in the English-speaking countries because education authorities in many European countries do not record their student data in terms of FTE.  On this subject, however, Turkey is similar to the English-speaking countries, since there is a time limit for completion of studies and detailed statistics on researchers and students according to level and department are available from the Council of Higher Education.3

 

Pricing is an aspect of the ANKOS agreements which, as has been noted for consortia elsewhere, requires time, innovative thinking and patience. Most, if not all, early ANKOS contracts for electronic access were based on print subscriptions held by the ANKOS members.  In the first years it seemed an obvious and even fair approach. As pointed out earlier, however, many Turkish universities, especially the newest ones, have no or very few print subscriptions, and the pricing schemes of the publishers were allowing them access at a tiny fraction of the amounts paid by older members.  Initially this situation was accepted by the larger or better funded libraries as a way to bring resources to those less fortunate institutions.  As the years passed and the better-off libraries were supporting ever increasing numbers of members at higher and higher percentages of the costs, the Steering Committee undertook to convince the vendors to agree to a total price for the consortium and leave the distribution to ANKOS.  This has been accomplished with several three-year contracts, both with aggregators and journal publishers, although with a certain amount of grumbling from the libraries whose yearly subscription rates increased more than they had expected.

 

The first publisher with whom ANKOS signed an agreement including an ANKOS-dictated fee structure was the Thomson Company for its Web of Science.  All ANKOS/WOS members subscribe to two indexes (in all but one case Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index) and may choose to subscribe also to the third.  Member libraries were grouped by ANKOS into four "tiers" according to a formula which gave points to each library for the number of its full-time equivalent (FTE) four-year undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and teaching staff;3 its collection budget; and the degree to which English is taught and/or used for instruction in the institution since all ANKOS contracts are so far for English-language materials.  The first three-year Thomson contract which used the ANKOS tiering system ended on December 31, 2004.  For the new three-year contract certain changes were made by ANKOS in the membership of the pricing tiers, taking into account the amount of use made by the members of the database agreement (use per FTE).  In these calculations, FTE, budget and use/FTE were weighted equally and extent of English use was given a lesser weight.  Another modification was the addition of a fifth tier, which disadvantaged institutions are able to join at a greatly reduced fee.  Tier 1 members pay the highest amount with the new Tier 5 paying 22% of the amount paid by Tier 1.  An auxiliary benefit to ANKOS members, although not reflected in the current license agreement, is a favorable price for back years, again based on the ANKOS tiers.  The 2002-2004 agreement had been joined by 47 libraries, and the 2005-2007 agreement has been accepted by 56 libraries.

 

Another publisher with whom ANKOS has a tier arrangement is IEEE.  A first abortive attempt at forming an ANKOS/IEEE consortium for 2003 was followed by more successful negotiations for 2004 whereby 22 ANKOS members had access to the IEL.  That agreement was for one year, and the ANKOS libraries that joined were grouped according to FTE figures for the respective university’s departments of electrical and electronics engineering, computer engineering, physics, physics engineering and biomedical engineering, as follows:  The number of undergraduate  students was multiplied by a factor ranging from 0.1 to 1 assigned to the institution according to the amount of English instruction there.  (Institutions where teaching is entirely in English were assigned the factor 1.)  To that number was added the total of postgraduate students and teaching staff multiplied by 3.  The universities were then divided into three groups according to their total FTE as calculated, so that the institutions with FTE>1399 were assigned to Group 1,  FTE=800-1399 to Group 2, and FTE<800 to Group 3.  Group 1 libraries paid the highest amount, Group 2 paid 25% less and Group 3 paid 50% less for the IEL database.  In addition, TUBITAK paid a special price for access by its various installations across Turkey.  Although it was originally ANKOS’ intention that the new contract be for 2005-2007, this was not realized.  For the year 2005 there are 25 members, grouped in the same manner as for 2004, with the same percentage price increase for each group.   

 

Although ANKOS members have had subscriptions to EBSCOhost databases for a number of years at so-called ANKOS prices, this year marks the first time a formal license agreement has been drawn up.  Members were divided into groups paying different amounts for the same databases and a multi-year contract is about to be signed with yearly price increases agreed upon.  A not entirely successful attempt was made to make ANKOS subscriptions more uniform (i.e. to have all members subscribe to Academic Search Premier at a favorable price rather than some to AS Elite, and the same for Business Search Premier/Elite).   The negotiations set off a fierce competition between the local ProQuest and Ebsco representatives in an attempt to wrest ANKOS members from each other, without much benefit to either or to ANKOS.  Favoring one or the other by ANKOS members appears to be a matter of habit more than anything objective.  With both firms, however, ANKOS was able to prevail in grouping members by its own criteria of FTE, budget and English usage. 

 

During the past year, one publisher which has been the subject of much discussion and controversy in the international library community is Elsevier, and ANKOS was not an exception in finding the early negotiations difficult.  ANKOS members have had agreements with Elsevier for Science Direct (including Academic Press, since there had already been an ANKOS agreement for those journals before the publisher was taken over by Elsevier) since 2001, when a one-year contract was signed.  That was followed by a three-year contract which ended on December 31, 2004.  The earlier contracts were based on each member's prior print subscriptions, with an added value for cross-access to all Science Direct subscriptions whether subscribed to by an ANKOS member or not.  For the new contract Elsevier presented ANKOS with an extremely complicated formula by which it charged members according to prior print holdings or lack of them with several add-on fees, which resulted in an unacceptably large increase over the 2004 fee.  At that point ANKOS presented a counter-offer which, although based on the 2004 "total spend", brought about some important changes in addition to reducing the price significantly.  Based on prior print holdings, it was pointed out that seven members of the 62 were paying 62% of the total ANKOS fee paid to Elsevier.  This meant that their fee per use of the database was much higher than the average of the other 55 members.  The ANKOS Steering Committee decided to reduce the seven members' share of the total to 50% and distribute the difference between 62% and 50% among the other 55 members.  The fee for accessing ANKOS non-subscribed titles was split between all 62 members.  At the time of writing of this article 58 of the former 62 members had accepted the new contract and four new members had signed on.  It is expected that as the staff members of the non-renewing institutions realize that they are without this resource, a number of the reluctant libraries will decide to join after all.  Because the new contract could not be finalized by the end of 2004, an interim one-month agreement was signed to allow time to complete the negotiations for the three-year license agreement.

 

Kluwer, and its new owner Springer, had also been ANKOS vendors with their respective one-year contracts ending December 31, 2004.  Despite the fact that their merger had been announced a year ahead, and an early request from ANKOS for a merged three-year renewal contract, the new Springer was unable to propose such a contract until early December.  Due to the unacceptability of its terms, ANKOS chose to make a one-year contract in the hope that a more reasonable agreement could be achieved during 2005 for later years.

 

Other contracts are also being renewed for 2005 (ACM, Blackwell Synergy, Bowker,  ebrary, Emerald, Gale, MathSciNet, Ovid, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis, Wiley InterScience).  Some of these are straightforward and some less so and will be the object of intensified efforts by ANKOS during 2005 for more favorable conditions in subsequent years as negotiators have more time available from not having to renew every contract each year.

 

CONCLUSION

ANKOS, in the three years of its activity, has gained valuable experience which has helped to shape its expectations from and approach to vendors.  As the number of members and vendor contracts grew, the importance of having a clear and comprehensive document became more obvious.  Thus while ANKOS is managed and operated by volunteer library directors and their staffs, a few of those volunteeers have the ongoing responsibility of negotiating contracts.  They have attempted to reduce this workload over time by preferring three-year agreements when possible and advantageous.  Fee distribution is another subject which has gained importance with the expansion of the consortium.  Whereas the fee distribution in early contracts was dictated by the vendors, more recently ANKOS has agreed on a global figure with distribution of the costs being the province of the consortium.  At this point in time, ANKOS has five main types of contractual arrangements: 1) "e-only plus consortium fee" (American Chemical Society, Elsevier Science Direct, IOP, Wiley); 2) "print plus consortium fee" (Emerald, Springer – with Kluwer); 3) "population (FTE)-based" (American Institute of Physics, Blackwell Synergy, Cambridge University Press, ebrary, JSTOR, Oxford University Press); 4) "scaled" (price decreases depend on increase in number of members) (Association of Computing Machinery, Bowker Books in Print & Ulrich's, MathSciNet, OVID, Serials Solutions, SIAM, Taylor & Francis; 5) "ANKOS-imposed groupings" by FTE, collection budget, level of English and usage (EBSCOhost, IEL, ProQuest, Web of Science). Only Thomson Gale applies fixed fee for all institutions within the consortium. 

 

Only two vendors have been dropped by ANKOS.  Ten ANKOS members subscribed to Safari E-books in 2003. Because of the limitation on concurrent users and complications with swapping book titles, the database was not used efficiently and ANKOS decided not to continue with it for 2004.  In late 2004 the vendor offered a new trial and relaxed the concurrent user restrictions a little, but this time there was not suffiecient interest among the institutions to reach an agreement.  ANKOS had included E-Village in its subscription list in 2002.  Originally this database was subscribed to by a group of universities with the same fixed price for each institution. Despite our warnings, the vendor arranged three-year contracts with libraries ending in different years. From 2002-2004 we observed big differences in the usage by member institutions, and we proposed that the vendor take the size and usage of the instittutions into account and work out a differential pricing. Due to the vendor's resistance to change its practices and pricing policy, ANKOS decided not to have a contract with E-Village for 2005.

 

While early contracts covered print and electronic versions of journals, as of 2004 ANKOS has left print subscriptions to the individual libraries to handle while the consortium makes agreements only for e-access.  It is to be hoped that a means will eventually be found to give ANKOS legal status, to enable it to obtain external funding, and to allow ANKOS to collect fees from its members in order to deal with the vendors as a single customer.

Notes

1.      Bulent Karasozen and Jane Ann Lindley, "The Impact of ANKOS: Consortium Development in Turkey", Journal of Academic Librarianship 30(5): 402-409, 2004.

2.      Official Gazette 28 December 2003 (supplement, no. 25330) and personal      communications of the directors of the private universities.

3.      Council of Higher Education webpage (http://www.yok.gov.tr/istatistikler/istatistikler) (latest figures are for 2002 - 2003) and personal communications of library directors.

4.      2004 ÖSYM Yükseköğretim Programları ve Kontenjanları Kılavuzu (Student Selection and Placement Center Guide to Higher Education Programs and Quotas).

5.      (http://www.heal-link.gr/SELL/index.html)

6.      (http://www.ankos.gen.tr/index.php) The ANKOS website lists licensing firms and participant institutions with information such as the time periods of the licenses and the ANKOS member libraries in each contract., a description of the ANKOS structure, and a list of member libraries, their directors, contact details, IP ranges and ANKOS liaison librarians.

7.      Kari Stange, Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen, Karin Bergstrom Gronvall, Eeva Laurila, "Cost division models in BIBSAM and FinELib consortia," Serials 16(3):285-292, 2003.

8.      Lluis Anglada, Nuria Comellas, "What's fair? Pricing models in the electronic era," Library Management 23(4):227-233, 2002.