The Acquisition Process and Principles

In the acquisition of e-resources FinELib adheres to the licensing policy and principles approved by the FinELib Consortium.

The licensing policy is based on internationally approved licensing principles with additions and adjustments made by the FinELib Consortium.

A basic principle in the FinELib licensing policy is that resources are licensed for the whole organisation, not e.g. for a single faculty or a separate unit. Also, the minimum number of subscribers of any one resource is four organisations. FinELib will not negotiate agreements for fewer than four consortium members.

In its licensing policy FinELib pays attention to the central issues in acquisition such as perpetual access, terms of use, contractual liability issues and the availability of usage statistics.

The Acquisition Process

The subject-specific expert groups have an important role in the acquisition process of the FinELib Consortium. Proposals for new acquisitions are coordinated and prioritised by the eight expert groups (seven subject-specific groups plus a public library group). The groups are open to all staff from the consortium member organisations. The final decision on new resources is made by the Consortium group.

Each member organisation decides for themselves which electronic resources they wish to subscribe to. The organisations sign in for the subscriptions in a two-phase process.

The FinELib service unit notifies the consortium members of the start of the subscription process. The subscription process for each e-resource starts as soon as pricing and other key elements of the agreement has been set. During the first phase organisations have three weeks time to inform FinELib of their initial interest in the e-resource. This phase is needed in order to find out which libraries would be interested in resources and to help set pricing. During the following three-week period organisations enter their binding subscriptions into the e-resources management database run by FinELib. The license agreements take effect January 1st.