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Libraries Adopting NISO's Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) at Rapid Rate

Publishers Adding to Growing Number of Adoptees

Baltimore, MD - December 22, 2008 - NISO welcomes 45 university and public libraries and the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) to the growing number of organizations that have adopted its best practices for SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding. The SERU Recommended Practice document (NISO-RP-7-2008) is freely available from: www.niso.org.
Among the 15 publishers to join recently are Springer Science+Business Media, Taylor & Francis, and White Horse Press; the total number of publishers is now 27. When SERU was first published in early 2008, 20 libraries participated in the trial use program; the additional 45 brings the total number now relying on SERU to 65.

SERU offers publishers and librarians the opportunity to save both the time and the costs associated with a negotiated and signed license agreement by agreeing to operate within a framework of shared understanding and good faith. Among the issues covered in the SERU best-practice document are perpetual access, archiving, and interlibrary loan.

"SERU is a wonderful example of librarians and publishers working together to create a new option for electronic resource transactions that is convenient and legal," said Working Group co-chair Karla Hahn, Director, Office of Scholarly Communications, Association of Research Libraries. "Small publishers, especially, will be able to use SERU to reduce licensing costs making them more competitive and easier for librarians to work with."

"As a consortium of research libraries, GWLA members work together to share resources, many of which currently require the negotiation of signed license agreements that are time-consuming and costly," said Anne E. McKee, Program Officer for Resource Sharing for GWLA. "We applaud the value of SERU in enabling both libraries and publishers to work together in good faith to provide our users with access to electronic content while avoiding the hurdles often associated with negotiated license agreements."

Janet Belanger Morrow, Head, Non-Print Management at Northeastern University Libraries, cited a specific victory: "In our first experience with SERU, we completed a negotiation for e-access with a University Press in one week! This is definitely a record for us. As the large publishers follow the lead of Taylor & Francis and Springer, there's the potential to return to the days when large, annual renewal negotiations were acquisitions transactions, completed quickly and efficiently to everyone's benefit."

Publication of the SERU best-practice document in February 2008 followed a six-month trial use period, during which time librarians and publishers reported on their experiences using the draft document. NISO is in the process of producing additional materials to help publishers and libraries adopt a SERU approach, maintain a registry of participants, and continue to promote, educate, and plan for regular review and evaluation of SERU.

The university libraries taking advantage of SERU include:

  • University of Alabama Libraries
  • Amherst College Library
  • Appalachian State University
  • Boise State University
  • Boston College Libraries
  • Boston College Law Library
  • Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library
  • Brown University Library
  • University at Buffalo (The State University of New York)
  • Cal Poly Pomona, University Library
  • University of Calgary Library
  • University of California, Berkeley
  • University of California, Irvine
  • University of California, Santa Barbara
  • University of Central Florida Libraries
  • Cisco Junior College Libraries
  • College of the Atlantic
  • Colorado State University Libraries
  • Columbia University Libraries
  • Denison University, William Howard Doane Library
  • Duke University Libraries
  • Eastern Kentucky University
  • Georgetown University, Lauinger Library
  • Green Mountain College
  • University of Hawaii at Manoa Libraries
  • Indiana University
  • Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
  • University of Kansas
  • University of Liverpool Library
  • Macalester College, DeWitt Wallace Library
  • University of Michigan
  • Michigan State University Libraries
  • Minneapolis Public Library
  • MIT Libraries
  • Morehead State University
  • Naval Postgraduate School, Dudley Knox Library
  • University of New Mexico Libraries
  • New York University
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  • North Carolina State University
  • Northeastern University Libraries
  • Northeastern University Law Library
  • University of Northern Iowa
  • Northwestern University Library
  • University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Libraries
  • Nova Southeastern University, Law Library and Technology Center
  • Ohio State University Libraries
  • Oregon State University
  • University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library System
  • University of Puget Sound Library
  • Rutgers University Libraries
  • San Diego Public Library
  • San Diego State University Library
  • Smith College Libraries
  • Southern Illinois University Carbondale
  • University of Texas at El Paso
  • Trinity University
  • University of Virginia Library
  • Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries
  • Wake Forest University
  • University of Washington Libraries
  • University of Western Ontario
  • Wesleyan Library
  • Yale University Library

Consortia that have joined the SERU Registry are:

  • Amigos Library Services
  • Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)
  • Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA)
  • PALINET
  • Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC)
  • Triangle Research Libraries Network

Publishers signed up on the SERU Registry are:

  • American Society for Nutrition
  • The American Physiological Society
  • American Psychological Association
  • Berg Publishers
  • Berghahn Journals
  • The Berkeley Electronic Press
  • BioOne
  • Duke University Pres
  • European Mathematical Society Publishing House
  • Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
  • Genetics Society of America
  • The Geological Society Publishing House
  • International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE)
  • Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications
  • Naxos of America, Inc.
  • now - the essence of knowledge
  • Project Euclid
  • The Scholarly Publishers' Collaborative Network
  • Society of Leukocyte Biology
  • Springer Science+Business Media
  • Taylor & Francis Group
  • Telos Press Publishing
  • 3princess publishing, LLC
  • UK Serials Group (UKSG)
  • University of Toronto Press, Journals Division
  • Walter de Gruyter, Inc.
  • The White Horse Press

About NISO

NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). More information about NISO is available at www.niso.org.

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