Taylor & Francis Adopts NISO's Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU)

Baltimore, MD - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) welcomes Taylor & Francis, a leading international academic publisher, as the most recent adopter of 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.
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.

"SERU doesn't do away with contracts. It just sets mutually implicit terms and conditions if we chose to forgo the long process of negotiating a full license agreement," stated Margaret Donahue Walker, North American Journals Sales Director for Taylor & Francis. "Many of our current customers and consortia contacts are signed up, as well. This means we can expedite orders and deliver content to end users without delay."

Judy Luther, President of Informed Strategies and Co-chair of NISO's Working Group on SERU, noted, "Based on a decade of licensing experience, SERU represents widely adopted practices already in place in North America, and is both library and publisher friendly."

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.

About the National Information Standards Organization (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 on its website: www.niso.org.