The consortium has been built up mainly for purchasing licenses for the electronic materials. Even though the focus is on the academic libraries, the consortium is open to all kind of interested organisations from public libraries to information centres of private companies.

There are 55 member organisations in the consortium at the moment, and the number is increasing. All the nineteen universities in Finland are participating, as well as several research institutes and various libraries of the polytechnics. Even though the public libraries have been very interested in the activity, the content material has not been seen relevant enough to their users and no public library are participating yet. The total number of users registered in the consortium is about 80 000.

The Finnish consortium signed the first agreement in 1997 with the Academic Press publishing house. At this time, several other agreements (e.g. CSA, Ebsco, Ovid, PCI and Springer) have been signed and new services will be in use from the beginning of next year. Present agreements cover about 100 reference databases and 2500 full text journals. Following the practical implementation of the service, the promotion of the use is an area, where a lot of work and publicity will also be required.

In addition to the negotiations on the national level, there are also arrangements for combining common interests on the Nordic and European level. Strategic alliances will be especially important in the field of specific disciplines, where national consortiums are comparatively small. A close co-operation at the level of information exchange has been established and in the near future also cross national license agreements will hopefully be made.

Agreement negotiation guidelines

The guidelines created by the Dutch and German libraries and adapted by the European Research Libraries' Group LIBER, have been used as bases for the Finnish agreements. The Council of the Finnish University Rectors has accepted the guidelines, and they are followed in the practical negotiations. If new contracts have not conformed to the guidelines, a critical remark has been done to the publisher. Some positive feedback from separate publishers has already been received, such as option of the ILL and better selection of journals. Some local priorities also have been established, according to which:

The preferable contract period is two years. The preferable pricing option is based on real use. If this information is not available, the option used should be based on the publishers pricing principles, print subscriptions or the number of potential users expressed in terms of the FTEs. ILL option to electronic resources equal to conventional material is a critical need for Finnish libraries. The right to cancel printed versions should not be restricted. The need to monitor the use and to produce management information locally should be focused.

The National Library is responsible for all the practical agreement negotiations and for signing the contracts. One full time project manager has been employed for this task and also a legal adviser has been used on the basis of a consultant agreement.

Financing principles

FinELib financing of the period of two years is centrally granted by the Ministry of Education and the budget totals 5 million ECU. Because the source of income is The Additional Research Funding Program of the Ministry, the central financing covers only the expenses of the university sector. All the other organisations are responsible for their own costs.

In order to guarantee the continuity of the FinELib program, a long term financing model is under consideration. The model is based on two principles: firstly, part of the material, which is general in nature and contributes to several disciplines, should be fully financed by the Ministry. Secondly, in order to commit participants to the acquisition program, the Ministry and the participants should share the costs of material on specific disciplines on half-and-half bases. The preferred contract period is two years, and after that time universities should take the responsibility for paying 20% of the costs of the general material, too.

The financing model takes into account several aspects relevant to the libraries during the transition period from print to electronic. All the print subscriptions cannot be cancelled as soon as the electronic versions are introduced, because of special user needs and of the restrictions in the publisher contracts. However, parallel services mean extra costs to the libraries and the central financing is needed to compensate the transition costs and to allow the libraries time to:

Creating a critical mass of electronic material to attract users. Promoting the use of the electronic documents and provide user training. Balancing their own budgets by cancelling print subscriptions. Guaranteeing permanent access to the material. Agreeing on the policies and means of long term preservation of the purchased material.

The principles for sharing costs among the universities are based on the publishers' pricing models. Most often the prices are defined on the bases of the print subscriptions. The other option is the number of users in each organisation expressed in terms of the FTEs. As soon as any comprehensive figures about the amount of real use are available, the publishers' pricing polices will most likely be based on these facts. This information also provides a more rightful option for sharing costs among the consortium. At the moment the best basis for setting prices for the participants is the size of the organisation.

The Role of the National Library as a publisher

The National Library is also playing a role as a publisher and encouraging electronic publishing. Scholarly publishing in Finland is seeking new channels and experimenting with the use of electronic media. It is a good way to compensate the problems associated with being a small language area and to accelerate content production.

The National Library two years ago initiated a joint development project, called Elektra, for libraries, publishers, collecting societies and learned societies. Elektra provides a new electronic publishing service and a network distribution channel for the copyright material published by the Finnish Learned Societies. Already over 40 scientific journals have contributed to the project, and more than 3000 articles have been published and are accessible on-line in the Elektra service. Copyright contracts have been formulated and signed with all the authors and publishers of the included documents.

In the first stage of the user study of Electra, the database has been accessible in seven test libraries. They have the right to give the users free access to the Elektra database on the library premises in order to read the articles. Conditions for printing the articles have been established and a pay-per-use model has been employed. Because Elektra is a pilot project, the prices have been nominal. Even such nominal fees have however enabled analysis of fee-based services.

In the extension of Elektra project, the user service will be further developed and new agreements will be based on the site licenses. Reading, writing and down loading rights will be given to the contracting organisation, such as universities and higher education institutes. The authentication of users and the electronic payment mechanisms are critical issues in the development of network services. The Finnish Ministry of Finance is developing an electronic authentication system for citizens. Elektra is one of the test sites for this new service.

As the producer of the Union Catalogues and the National Bibliographies the National Library is in the position of the publisher to offer this data for public use. According to the Finnish legislation, remote access to databases is subject to pricing and user contracts are required. After the introduction of the new Internet web-gateway technology, the need for site licensing mechanism is obvious and under construction.

Integration of the OPACs and full text services provides the users seamless access to relevant content, free of carrier type, and promotes not only the use of new electronic resources, but also the exploitation of the existing collections. To enable integrated access to the electronic journals acquired by the country licenses, they will be catalogued to the Union Catalogues and direct links will be created to the publisher's services.

The Act of Legal Deposit in Finland is under revision and a task group headed by the Ministry of Education has prepared a proposal for the new Act. According to it from the beginning of the year 2000 electronic documents will be included in the legislation and will become part of the legal deposit. In addition to the copyright material also freely available documents in the Finnish Internet will be widely adopted to the legal deposit collections and will be harvested and preserved for subsequent generations. Access to the indexes of this data will be provided but the use of the documents will be limited to the premises of the legal deposit libraries.

Conclusions

Licence agreements seem to be the most promising option for setting access rights to the electronic material under copyright. This is a mechanism widely adopted by the big international publishing houses all over the world. Libraries have found a new solution to adjust to market pressure i.e., joining with each other into consortiums. The Finnish consortium organised by the FinELib program, is a good example of such a successful co-operation.

In a short time the consortium itself has been expanded and several license agreements have been signed. By means of country licenses the Finnish research community has at this time, access to a remarkable number of databases and electronic journals over their local networks, and the amount of sources in increasing. From an individual researcher's point of view, this is a tremendous improvement in the selection of potential sources available and will hopefully have positive impacts in the quality and quantity of research results.

The critical success factors of the country licensing activity in Finland have been the advanced technical infrastructure in place, a respectively small number of potential users in the country, a long traditions in close co-operation between the research libraries and, thanks to the Ministry of Education, centrally organised financing. Site licensing mechanism will also be tested as the mean for distributing Finnish electronic material published by the National Library to the users.

Inkeri Salonharju, Director of Library Network Services,
Helsinki University Library - The National Library of Finland
Email: Inkeri.Salonharju@helsinki.fi

Reference addresses

This article is based on the paper presented at an International Conference and Workshop: Electronic Copyright and Digital Licensing organised by Eblida and the Italian Library Association AIB in Rome, November 6, 1998.