Sara Hearn is the Publishing Manager at RMIT Publishing [HREF1], PO Box 12058 A'Beckett Street, Melbourne VIC 8006. sara.hearn@rmit.edu.au
RMIT Publishing has been an electronic publisher for the past 12 years. We have served the academic and research community with 80+ research databases across a range of disciplines both on CD-ROM and online via the Informit range of products.
RMIT Publishing is now embarking on a new publishing program - making the full text of Australian research materials available to libraries, educational institutions, government departments and agencies, research centres and associated groups.
This program is being called Informit Library and will include online journals, monographs, textbooks, conference proceedings, research reports, working papers and other grey literature not readily available in print or online.
Much in the same way we have aggregated indexing of research with our databases, we are now seeking to aggregate the content of that research, making access easier for institutional users and establishing a permanent archive of Australian research information.
At present much work is being done to obtain non-exclusive licences to the material and to develop a content management system that allows the greatest flexibility in customising content and the interface.
RMIT Publishing has been a major electronic publisher for the education, research and business sectors since the early 1990s. During this time we have published databases and other research resources both on CD-ROM and online. We have also published textbooks and monographs in print when we have considered this medium the most appropriate.
Now in our second decade, we are continuing to provide access to a range of information resources with a view to developing new types of information services which meet the changing needs of our customers.
The first publications produced by RMIT Publishing (then known as Informit) were compilations of research databases produced on CD-ROM in 1990. The first of these, AUSTROM, is still being published on CD-ROM (as well as online). AUSTROM is a collection of bibliographical research databases covering a wide range of public affairs subjects including education, law, social services, sport, and multicultural affairs.
The success of AUSTROM was followed by similar compilations of databases such as Engineering & Applied Science and single database titles such as AUSTGUIDE.
A second major range of products was pioneered in the early 1990s. An entire series of indexes to births, deaths and marriages data grew from the first genealogical CD-ROM: Victorian Pioneer Index.
There are now over 70 databases published under the Informit imprint, most still available on 10 CD-ROM compilations but all now available through Informit Online [HREF2]. Informit Online was launched in 1998 and is a commercial online service providing access to bibliographic and full text databases focusing on Australian content.
In the late 1990s it become obvious that while our databases were increasing in popularity, our customers (libraries) required the full text of articles. It was no longer sufficient to simply provide an index to articles, chapters or papers. Users (students and researchers) were able to locate the full text of many international publications via the Internet either for free if they were government reports or for a fee if they were journal articles published by the major journal publishers such as Elsevier or Blackwells.
We embarked on a major project with the Copyright Agency Limited to clear articles that were indexed in our most widely used databases, APAIS (Australian Public Affairs Information Service) published in conjunction with the National Library of Australia. In July 2000, we launched Australian Public Affairs-Full Text. Since then we have released a further two products along similar lines, Meditext based on the AMI (Australasian Medical Index) database and AGIS Plus Text based on AGIS (Attorney-General's Information Service).
All three of these full text databases have been enthusiastically received by the academic, medical and allied health and legal sectors as they fulfill a need not previously met. There are currently over 47,000 articles available across these three product and the number is increasing monthly. However, these products have always been viewed as stepping stones to a much broader and more flexible full text information service.
Over the past two years, it has become clear that more access to the full text of research resources is required. While there are 100's of journals represented in our existing full text databases, there are still many more research publications that are used by our customers (libraries) and their users.
Therefore, we are actively seeking rights from the copyright holders of journals, conference proceedings, research reports, working papers and other 'grey' literature to expand our existing 'library' of resources.
We are currently developing a completely new content management system that will not only store and provide access to our existing products but will only allow us to flexibly re-package current material with new material to be used in libraries reference centers, e-reserve and for online courses.
As with all new publishing enterprises, there have been problems and issues to be dealt with.
The organizations publishing these journals are often doing so as a sideline to their core function of running a professional association, or a university department. They do not have the administrative resources to go back to the contributors over the last few years to make sure they have the rights to license a third-party like RMIT Publishing to re-publish the works online.
To overcome this we have suggested two courses of actions. Firstly, we strongly advise such organizations to have written agreements with their contributors which can take the form of a simple letter which clearly licenses the journal publisher to publish the article in the print edition of the journal and also to sub-license articles in an online edition. We encourage the journal publisher to introduce such agreements as soon as possible so that ongoing volumes and issues can be re-published online.
Secondly, if the organization has the capacity, we offer advice on how they can go about obtaining the digital rights from their previous contributors. This depends on many factors such as the organization having contact details for their contributors and the means and time to make contact.
All of these resources have quite different structures and we spent a considerable amount of time coming up with a content management system that accommodated all of them without compromising any of them. This structure is apparent when viewing the Informit Library site [HREF3].
Another aspect of content management is what file type or types should we employ to display the content. At the time of the original development there were two main choices, PDF and HTML. Currently we convert all Informit Library resources into both these formats even though at present we do not allow the user to select the format in which they wish to view the document. This choice will be introduced early next year with other substantial functional changes.
The reason for having both PDF and HTML formats is that when accessing works online, users sometimes wish to view and search across a HTML file. However, if a user wishes to make reference to a work it is easier to reference according to the page numbering and layout of the original work which can be seen in PDF.
A third important issue we encountered was what navigation would allow users to easily access the full content. We realized that users would still want to find full text information by doing a search in particular fields, for example, locate a particular author or a particular title, in much the same way as they searched using bibliographic databases. However, we also knew that increasingly some users would wish to browse the particular resources, such as journals, they subscribe to.
In developing our current interface we have allowed for both methods of navigation - searching and browsing. There are still a number of aspects to our interface which we are not completely happy with but we are intending to rectify these with our new interface due for release in 2003. For example, providing a way for the user to go to any part of the site with as few clicks as possible but without cluttering up the screen. In effect, we aim to make the interface as intuitive as possible and anticipate what the user is likely to want to do next.
However, we wanted Informit Library to be a flexible as possible and to allow customers the ability to choose the specific resources they want access to and for how long. To cater for this, pricing really needs to be broken down to the smallest chunk of information (e.g. a journal article or chapters). We currently price resources as their highest level (e.g. journal, book). Possible alternatives could be part s of resources, collections of parts from different resources or collections of whole resources. As we receive more customer feedback on how our users wish to access resources we will start to introduce more flexible pricing models.
Do you allow purchasers to only view the content or can they download
or print the item as well?
Currently there are a multitude of variations on this. Some include a cost
for searching for the item via their databases, others factor in the time
the user spends on the service completing their search and accessing the desired
full content. Again, further market feedback is required to be able to establish
a model that works best for the customer.
What methods of payment do you accept?
The most simple and common form is the credit card e-commerce facility where
customers pay for the item they want before they are able to view the file.
This might work for individual researchers but what about institutions that
want to access content on a pay-as-you-go basis? Will entering in credit
card details every time be the most efficient way to make the transaction?
Or will those organizations want to set up either a debit or credit account
to record and pay for accumulated transactions? Again, it is a matter of
obtaining market feedback, over a period of time to ascertain the best approach.
We have followed the same approach to paying royalties for the Informit Library service as we have followed for the past 10 years with our database providers. The formula is a 50/50 split after costs. Costs include government taxes (GST), discounts given to distributors and agents who sell the products in various markets and production costs.
The following breakdown shows the royalty paid to the licensee or copyright holder and the profit that comes to RMIT Publishing.
The next question is perhaps even more challenging, how do you distribute royalties from sales comprising of numerous resources? For instance, a state library may purchase a selection of resources on a certain topic (e.g. history). This may include some journals, a series of monographs and several collections of conference proceedings. There could be 10 different copyright holders represented by this collection. Do you distribute royalties proportionally based on the relative value of the resources or the relative amount of information in each resource - is a journal with five years worth of previous issues worth more than a monograph?
Again, there are no tried and true market-tested models available so at present we have decided to distribute royalties proportionally based on the resource price.
Perhaps the important question is that asked by the copyright holders we are approaching to include their resources and information on Informit Library. Depending on the nature of the resources and the type of organization there are several benefits to publishing content on Informit Library.
We do not require exclusivity to publish resources on Informit Library. That is, we allow authors/copyright holders to fully exploit their material in other formats and with other organizations. Similarly, it is not a problem if the material currently resides on a website and is freely available.
As already mentioned, we are happy if the resources exist online elsewhere and are freely available. We aim to provide an aggregated service to our principal market, libraries. Libraries are willing to pay for access to material in one location rather than having to manage access through disparate web sites. Some web sites are subject to being moved causing breaks in links and are not being regarded as stable enough to act as an ongoing archives.
In fact, Informit Library can be the archive of your material as it will be hosted on a site with persistent links.
Placing resources on Informit Library will also mean they can be linked to existing RMIT Publishing bibliographic indexes such as APAIS. Links can also be established from databases published by other online providers who wish to provide full text access.
Resources available on Informit Library will sit within a sophisticated content management system that also holds metadata on those resources to support linking to the content from other services or sites.
If the resources come from a member-based association, then access can be set up allowing members to use their association's resources within the Informit Library framework. This results in value-adding for the members but a reduction of overheads for the association.
Perhaps obvious, but any revenue that flows from participating in Informit Library can be used to invest in further projects or publications.
If the content is research that meets the DEST APA Guidelines, then publishing in the first instance on Informit Library will meet the commercial publication requirement. RMIT Publishing is an approved publisher and in fact is DEST's current model for electronic publishers.
As outlined above, there have been many challenges faced in establishing an online full text service for Australian research information. There are many challenges still be to be faced, in particular, pricing and packaging of content. RMIT Publishing seeks to continue its collaborations with academic, research and government organizations to work out the best way to meet these challenges and ensure that access to Australian resources is provided in a cost-effective and equitable way.
RMIT Publishing is a business unit of RMIT Training Pty Ltd [HREF4], a company owned by RMIT University [HREF5].
RMIT Publishing, © 2002. The authors assign to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.