Consortium electronic book licenses - it's just a serial

Abstract

OhioLINK makes broad use of “big deal” licenses for electronic journals to expand journal access across the consortium and to dramatically improve the cost effectiveness and control of our investment in journals. Many of the same objectives, techniques, results, and lessons from electronic journal licenses can be applied to large scale, consortium-level electronic book licenses. Annual group purchase patterns for books, at the publisher level, reveal a relatively consistent basis for establishing “big deal” electronic book licenses with many common characteristics to our electronic journal licenses. With a few modifications in technique, effective consortium level electronic book licenses can be fashioned.