Frederick Friend

Frederick Friend (Director of Scholarly Communication at University College, London f.friend@ucl.ac.uk), is Co-Chair of a JISC Steering Group which manages the EASY Project

Electronic article supply as a complement to ILL services
The JISC/Publishers EASY Project

JISC and various publishers have established a two-year pilot project to test the feasibility of a service to satisfy requests from UK HE libraries for electronic journal articles, as a complement to ILL services. The pilot is being run jointly by ingenta and Lancaster University, the latter utilising its widely-implemented ILLOS system. Perceived benefits to libraries include the cost-effective maintenance and even enhancement of ILL service provision in the face of economic constraints. Publishers will benefit by receiving some income from the supply of articles in response to ILL requests where they currently receive none, as well as acquiring information on the demand for journals and individual articles. The pilot service will be provided for a flat rate fee per article at a rate comparable with current ILL charges.

Libraries using the pilot service will continue to manage ILL request services within their own institutions as seems appropriate to them but will be able to offer end-users a Web-based facility to make requests for articles. If the requested article is available electronically then ingenta will

• supply the article direct to the end-user, if the library is a subscriber to the journal, or,
• if the library does not subscribe, send a message to the ILL administrator offering to supply it at the fixed fee. If the library approves this offer, the article will be sent to the end-user, either directly or via the ILL department, as an email attachment (PDF).

If the journal is not available electronically via ingenta, then the request will be returned to the ILL department (and the ILL administrator informed) for processing as a normal ILL request.

ingenta will charge the requesting library for each article from journals to which it does not subscribe on an aggregated basis. A fixed percentage of the charge will be distributed to the publisher.

The pilot service is designed as a relatively small scale 'proof of concept' project for journal articles only. However the service is intended to be capable of development to a large scale operation and possible extension to other types of material.

Lancaster University has developed a Web interface to ILLOS to process ILL requests, without requiring additional work by requesting libraries, and intends to distribute the EASY facility as an upgrade to ILLOS 2.0. ingenta Ltd. (through ingentaJournals) already provides access to electronic versions of over 2,500 journals from over 35 publishers and will actively seek to expand this base during the life of the project.

The Project is being managed by a JISC Steering Group chaired jointly by Frederick Friend (Director of Scholarly Communication at University College, London f.friend@ucl.ac.uk), and Sally Morris (Secretary-General of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers sec-gen@alpsp.org). Kerry Blinco of Macquarie University, has been appointed as System Architecture consultant to the Project. Lancaster Information Management Consultancy, led by Professor Peter Brophy, has been contracted to undertake the Project evaluation.

Although not part of the JISC Join-Up programme, the EASY Project is working in a similar area. JISC funding for the Project has been provided as part of the programme between JISC and the publishers' organizations and the hope is that the Project will lead to a self-supporting service.