Librarians have long complained about the nondisclosure agreements, or NDA’s, that some publishers and vendors require them to sign, making it difficult to share information about how much they pay to subscribe to journal databases and other scholarly material. Some state universities’ libraries have been able to reveal licensing terms anyway because their institutions are subject to sunshine laws. Now one major private institution, Cornell University, has publicly declared it’s had enough of confidentiality agreements, too.
“To promote openness and fairness among libraries licensing scholarly resources, Cornell University Library will not enter into vendor contracts that require nondisclosure of pricing information or other information that does not constitute a trade secret,” the library said in a statement posted on its Web site. “The more that libraries are able to communicate with one another about vendor offers, the better they are able to weigh the costs and benefits of any individual offer. An open market will result in better licensing terms.”
Anne R. Kenney, Cornell’s university librarian, said that with purchasing decisions under close scrutiny, it felt like the right moment to take a stand. Enough major publishers have agreed to drop nondisclosure clauses “that it was time to bite the bullet and make that a principle moving forward,” she said. “Publishers are beginning to get it.”
At the end of its statement, the Cornell library listed some of the publishers that do not request confidentiality clauses when they negotiate licenses. They include the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press, EBSCO, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, ProQuest, Sage, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. (If a publisher does not appear on the list, that doesn’t necessarily mean it requires NDA’s, just that it hasn’t been in recent contract negotiations with Cornell’s library.)
Ms. Kenney said that Cornell is joining “a groundswell among academic libraries to start to routinely ask for the removal of NDA’s.” In June 2009, the Association of Research Libraries urged its members to steer clear of nondisclosure or confidentiality clauses.
“Part of our rationale in going public with this is to make evident that private institutions are also starting to feel that this is not a good way of doing business,” Ms. Kenney said.
Support for the Move
Several librarians at other universities said their institutions had taken positions similar to Cornell’s, even if they haven’t publicly posted their policy on NDA’s. “Yes, we have taken a similar approach for the past year,” said Winston Tabb, the dean of university libraries and museums at the Johns Hopkins University. He wrote in an e-mail that “we believe that transparency is appropriate for libraries generally; and in particular that we should not agree to withhold information about how we are spending an increasingly huge—and ever-growing—percentage of our stretched library budgets.”
Karin Wittenborg, the university librarian at the University of Virginia, praised the Cornell move. In an e-mail, she called its stance on NDA’s “a wonderful thing, highlighting the ways in which major private universities that are not already subject to public records requirements can support transparency and fairness in library licensing.”
From this point on, Cornell’s library will try to renegotiate “all new and renewed licenses” submitted to it with nondisclosure clauses. So far, it has had to drop only one license because the publisher did not want to remove the NDA. The resource at stake was the electronic version of the American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Cornell simply bought the print edition instead of access to the database version.
Peter Hirtle, a senior policy adviser for the Cornell library, said it’s too early to gauge the impact that the increasingly open environment was having on individual libraries’ negotiations. But he expects that knowing, for instance, what the University of California system paid for the Nature Group’s licenses—a sensational topic on the library-licensing front last year—will strengthen Cornell’s position. “With that information in hand, I’m sure that will shape our discussions with Nature the next time that comes up for renewal,” he said.
Ms. Kenney added that she understood the California system’s concern about a steep rise in Nature’s prices. But, she said, “it was pretty shocking to me that they were getting such a great deal.”
