1. Jurisdiction - Many US state groups must list their own state as the jurisdiction - we are not overly concerned given that the legal risk is minuscule -- it is not worth the effort of changing every licence.
2. Copyright - many licences refer to the US Copyright Act and CONTU guidelines instead of simply referring to the national copyright regulations of the country in which the information is being used. CONTU guidelines are actually broader than the Australian copyright act. However, as in the case of jurisdiction, we don't attempt to change every licence.
3. Delivery of notices - often "by post within two to five days" - a bit unrealistic when they are coming this far - we usually suggest fax or email!
4. Date/time - invoices from the US are in US format [mm/dd/yy] - global publishers might learn to use global date formats [dd/mm/yy], or at least an unambiguous format [December 6, 2004]. Spring and Fall are well understood here, naturally, but we have to translate EVERY time. Very northern hemisphere-centric. Only one publisher has thought to inquire if this was an issue. Fortunately we are multi-lingual - we speak both English and American.
5. Help desk - we are lucky if we get an Asia-based help desk, or even a US Pacific time - it's taking a very long time for global publishers to operate 24x7 help desks. Ditto for downtime. Those who do their backups/upgrades on our Sunday afternoons (US Saturday nights) are most likely eating into the best time for our faculty to do their research.
6. National Education System. Our universities are rather more homogenous than US universities and colleges. All 39 have all levels of courses from bachelors to doctorates, all are multi-disciplinary, half are multi-campus (although with a single administration), law schools and medical schools are just faculties of the university. We have many universities with formal, and large, distance education programs. Remote access is a norm. We constantly argue for FTE-based pricing instead of site-based pricing to accommodate this. We spend much time educating publishers about the differences between the US and Oz systems, and between the JISC model of consortial purchasing and our model.
7. Currency. Unless there is genuine AUD-based pricing, we prefer our contracts to be expressed in the original currency, and pay in that currency. Some vendors think they are doing us a favour by translating into Australian dollars for us, but unless it is a fixed amount, it can only be regarded as an estimate. Some will force us into one currency over another, eg for one European publisher, we preferred the contract to be in USD, but were constrained to EUR because of our geographical location, and our local (Asia-based) representative reports to the European office.
8. Negotiation. Mostly by email. Sometimes by telephone. Less frequently in person. The advantage of the first is that everything is in writing, but the third is doubtless the quickest way to sort out a number of issues upfront. In the last couple of years, more have started to make the journey from Europe and the US, which makes a nice change. It is also pleasing that when vendors do make a time to ring us, they choose our business hours rather than theirs, which means East Coast US and UK folks are up in the middle of the night to talk to us.
9. Content. We buy 80-90% of our content from off-shore, mostly from the US and Europe, all languages but mostly English. There is obviously very little Australian content in most of the journal packages or aggregations that we buy, and it is a regular question to encourage the inclusion of Australian journals, particularly in aggregations.
10. Advisory Boards. Although some publishers do think to include Asia or Australasia in the membership of their advisory boards (congratulations to Blackwell) most still think that ALA or London Online are on the regular schedules of all of us.
Diane Costello
3 July, 2004
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This site is written, compiled and maintained by Diane Costello, Executive Officer, CAUL.