JISC Collections: Corporate Plan 2010-11
This plan sets out JISC Collections’ strategy for 2010-2011. It was developed through consultation and discussion with our member organisations.
Foreword Much has changed since our first corporate plan in 2006 and we have achieved many of our goals. Priorities have changed for our member organisations as they face financial uncertainties and have to deal with increasingly complex situations. We also face new challenges, as we seek to become a selffunding organisation, integrate our new colleagues into JISC Collections and manage our affairs across two offices. Making the move to a self-funding model and managing the transition successfully is of such critical importance that it merits a separate plan dedicated to that activity. This plan will therefore not deal with the issue of sustainability.
In the current uncertain and challenging financial environment, we need more than ever to deliver efficiency gains to our members through the effective management and procurement of digital content, while at the same time giving our staff the tools and confidence to meet these challenges.
(i)
Setting the context
JISC Collections is not a lobby or pressure group but we have a role in presenting the needs of our members to publishers and other suppliers of content. Equally, JISC Collections does not ‘sell’ publishers’ content – but we will explore how we can ‘kite mark’ resources to indicate that they are fit for purpose and that they comply with the appropriate industry standards.
As a shared service, our resources are focused on providing efficiencies by delivering our core services. However, partnerships with other agencies may allow us to ‘refer’ members to other appropriate organisations for specific help outside our domain.
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(ii)
Partnership working
Working in partnership is central to our capacity to deliver our strategy. We attach the greatest importance to engaging with our stakeholders, and increasingly we will need to collaborate with representative groups in both the academic and the publishing sectors.
We also need to develop new ways of working with the organisations that are closest to us, including JISC and the national data centres, and in doing so seek to understand their expectations and consider their views when developing and implementing our own strategies.
(iii)
Communication
We serve a diverse membership and need to ensure we tailor our communications accordingly. Briefing documents must be relevant and clearly understood by both our members and our funders; they must also use the most appropriate channels. Where necessary, we will seek assistance from our funders for delivering key messages.
Our core service JISC Collections is the UK national academic digital content licensing consortium, a shared service to produce efficiencies for our member organisations by providing expertise in negotiating and procuring high-quality online content.
Our members include all higher and further education institutions and the research councils in the UK, and our affiliate member mandate allows us to include bodies as diverse as public libraries, schools and pharmaceutical companies. While it is recognised that each sector, and often each organisation within a sector, has different needs and priorities, we strive to ensure that our core service is valid for all.
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In addition to our key strategic aim – to deliver our core service – we have nine other aims, each of which is supported by distinct critical success factors designed to be measured by appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Strategic aim 1: Our key strategic aim, to deliver our core service For member institutions, our core service can be defined as representing and promoting the interests of our members in our licensing, negotiation and research activities. This means:
Delivering centralised e-resource collections selected for academic and research use
Using our expertise in negotiating and procurement within the scholarly publishing sector to best effect
Obtaining best possible discounts and specific licensing requirements for accessing highquality online content
Researching into innovative licensing models and related best practice
Sharing and validating knowledge about e-resource acquisition
Through these activities, we save our members time and money by negotiating better deals than they would achieve on an individual basis. As a shared service, we represent many institutions and we are able to insist that publishers comply with our model licences and that they adopt the standards that ensure e-resources are discoverable and accessible. Our negotiation activity does not end with the signature of a licence agreement, but continues throughout the life of the agreement to ensure that the publishers provide our members with a high level of support and service.
We will achieve delivery of this core service using the following critical success factors and KPIs:
Maintaining the focus on the best possible price in all of our negotiations (KPI: All 2011 renewal agreements to be restricted to a price increase of between 0% and 3%)
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Reviewing the e-resources currently licensed by member institutions and, where there are high demand e-resources not covered by licensing agreements, seeking to include them in our portfolio (KPI: Undertake by the end of July 2010 a consultation across the membership to establish requirements)
Implementing tools that will allow member institutions to communicate their e-resource requirements to us, as the basis for new agreements (KPI: Develop an online and interactive ‘wish list’ facility for members as part of a future release of the new website)
Developing our website to make the subscription process as efficient as possible for our members (KPI: Ensure the new website delivers the appropriate functionality and that our members are fully informed as to how to exploit it)
Improving the timeliness of renewals and the communications around them (KPI: Ensure internal procedures and targets for renewals are established and communicated to staff. Implement a monthly newsletter for JISC Collections agreements like the one for NESLi2)
Improving the implementation of agreements – making sure that our members have effective access, correct and relevant metadata and accurate title lists (KPI: Create documented, in-house procedures for managing this process and communicate to all relevant staff)
Continuing our research into new licensing and business models that can benefit our members (KPI: Ensure that existing research reports are reviewed internally and actioned appropriately. Ensure wide dissemination of findings)
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Strategic aim 2: To improve access to e-resources that support teaching and learning in higher education Many students and their families are contributing more to higher education through variable tuition fees and with this comes greater expectations. Higher education also faces significant international competition to attract overseas students. Students are increasingly expressing their frustrations via university-wide or library satisfaction surveys. We need to ensure that we are in touch with this demand and work with our members to address it.
We will achieve this through the following critical success factor:
Researching the needs of teaching institutions to ensure that, where appropriate e-resources exist, we include them in our portfolio, and that such e-resources are available on terms and conditions that suit the needs of all types of students and the partnership approaches adopted by many institutions. (KPI: Improved satisfaction from teaching-focused institutions in the 2011 Satisfaction Survey)
Strategic aim 3: To negotiate robust agreements that provide higher education and other research members with affordable scholarly content Informed by our panel of experts, the journals and e-resources working group; we undertake central negotiations for electronic journals through NESLi2 and NESLi2 SMP.
We will improve and deliver this aim through the following critical success factors:
Developing, in partnership with Mimas, Evidence Base and the University of Cranfield, the JISC Usage Statistics Portal (KPI: Portal completed and available to all members by December 2011)
Gathering quantitative data and value metrics to inform our negotiations with publishers (KPI: Develop improved management information systems for our staff to use in negotiations with publishers, using data and arguments derived from recently commissioned studies) 5
Negotiating the flexibility that libraries are demanding without compromising our core aim of best value (KPI: For NESLi2, ensure that cancellation and substitution allowances are given more prominence and that libraries have a realistic alternative to the Big Deal)
Developing the models needed to facilitate equitable cost distribution for ‘national’ or closed consortium deals (KPI: Disseminate the findings of the Bloc Payment Study and work with selected groups to implement where appropriate)
Liaising and collaborating with groups within our community, RLUK, SCONUL and SHEDL to inform our negotiation strategies and to develop solution-based approaches which meet their needs (KPI: Develop closer links with these communities, and with library directors, to ensure that we are working together effectively in pursuit of our goals)
Prioritising our activity on the areas where institutions spend the most money and where reductions in price will have the greatest impact (KPI: Continue to develop communication strategies and negotiation arguments for renewals of the Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell agreements)
Strategic aim 4: To deliver value-added digital content to our members On behalf of institutions, we have bought perpetual licences for material that has collective value, e.g. legacy material, back digitisation of journals and digital images and film. At a national level, we license geospatial data that we deliver to members in collaboration with the national data centres.
To date we have been successful in ensuring that these e-resources have the widest possible levels of participation, and our aim is to ensure that we continue to be rigorous in our selection of content and in the quality of the services tailored to support education and research.
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Our critical success factors are:
Developing new partnership models with JISC and the national data centres to ensure effective delivery of centrally procured e-resources (KPI: Memorandum of understandings in place with the JISC national data centres by July 2010)
Developing a range of affordable business models to guarantee the sustainability of the services that deliver the content. In some cases this will require a fresh approach and a reliance not only on subscription fees, but on a ‘mixed economy’ (KPI: Review appropriate models for testing with selected pilot sites)
Strategic aim 5: To undertake projects and research to enhance services and systems for the academic community We need to engage proactively in projects and research that are drivers for change; projects that will increase the amount of content available to our members, develop new models for access and create the support tools our members need.
The following critical success factors will guide us in this aim:
Testing new business models for e-books (KPI: Engage with publishers involved in the e-textbook business models trials to find appropriate models that allow library-delivered access to course texts)
Testing new models for scholarly monographs (KPI: To provide a collection of Open Access Monographs by May 2011)
Developing services to monitor and manage a transition to Gold Open Access (KPI: By December 2010 to have a database available to all institutions showing Gold OA articles published by UK authors)
Developing tools that will enable institutions to manage licence agreements in an effective way
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(KPI: Provide the academic community with an online tool for the management of licence agreements by June 2011)
Strategic aim 6: To develop solutions to complex problems Our focus is on delivering value to all our members, and we use tools such as our model licences and banding scheme effectively. However, institutions increasingly face specific problems that require a tailored approach. We seek to develop solutions to problems such as: •
Mergers
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Partner organisation access, including medical schools
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Access by small and medium-sized institutions
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Access by NHS trusts
Critical success factors in this area are:
Using our human resources to provide ‘rapid responses’ to situations
Knowing when to use our standard tools (model licence and banding) and when to develop alternative strategies
Strategic aim 7: To provide a service to the further education sector In addition to our licensing and negotiation activity, we provide colleges with access to over 3000 e-books through the e-books for FE project. Funding for that project will last another four years.
We aim to continue to develop our service to further education and the following critical success factors apply:
Securing funding or a business model that allows us to continue our work for the sector
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Ensuring that we have a further education focus and that we do not present the sector with services or messages that are not relevant to it (KPI: To develop and maintain an FE ‘champion’ or expert in our organisation)
Negotiating more e-resources on a demand-led basis, particularly resources that support teaching in areas such as vocational, business, law, construction etc.
Strategic aim 8: To review our activities for affiliate members The number and diversity of our affiliate members continues to grow as JISC Collections’ reputation becomes more firmly established. Undertaking work for other sectors can potentially help us in our sustainability plans as well as exposing us to other negotiation and licensing challenges that add to corporate knowledge and experience.
However, we need to ensure that this work does not distract us from our core activities and that the communities we represent have a strategic fit and rationale with our mission.
Critical success factors in this area include:
Reviewing who our current affiliate members are and what they contribute
Establishing a business rationale for ongoing development of each sector, with particular reference to Schools and Pharmaceutical Companies where the demand and levels of service required could be significant (KPI: To have undertaken a review and developed a strategy for consideration by the JISC Collections Board by the end of 2010)
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Strategic aim 9: To implement a technically robust, affordable, secure and reliable IT platform to enable us to exploit and share management information and knowledge to best effect across all elements of our work on behalf of the community.
Critical success factors are:
Identifying our precise requirements for IT and support
Identifying the management information and supporting data that are key to our success
Using this information to build the appropriate management information system (KPI: Installation of a solution in readiness for Q4 of 2010 when we are likely to have our biggest requirement on the system)
Strategic aim 10: To continue to build a learning and development culture for staff working in JISC Collections by reviewing appropriate staff-related national standards and initiatives (eg IIP or Investors in Excellence) and consider implementing one.
Critical success factors are:
Consulting widely with other service-related organisations to find the best solution
Communicating our plans internally and securing buy-in from the senior leadership team and all staff (KPI: Identify an appropriate route and commence activity by the end of September 2010)
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