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 have access varies considerably, in accordance with the funds they have made available for the necessary licences (Section 4).

7.32. The past three years have seen a growing interest in the UK in licensing models under which access is provided not to a single university, but to a consortium. Such models are reasonably common in a number of other countries, including the US and Scandinavia. But the deals negotiated nationally by JISC Collections under the NESLi2 initiative operate on an opt-in basis: individual universities decide whether or not to take up the licence at the price offered. One of the difficulties in implementing a consortium model where access is shared across all members is the allocation of costs between institutions which may differ in size, research-intensity, and subject profile.

7.33. In Scotland, however, libraries for all nineteen HE institutions launched in 2009 a consortium scheme under which they have jointly purchased licences currently covering nearly two thousand journals from eight publishers. The apportionment of costs for the different licences between the Scottish HEIs is based on the historic expenditure of each institution with each publisher. Whether this apportionment model would be sustainable if joint licences were to cover a significantly larger number of publishers and journals is not yet clear. Similarly, it is widely assumed among librarians and others in the HE sector in the UK as a whole that reaching agreement on cost allocations across the much larger number of all the universities in England, for example, would prove extremely difficult. .

7.34. Nevertheless, the success of the SHEDL experiment has stimulated discussion about the scope for similar consortia to be established covering groups of universities in other parts of the UK; and renewed discussion about the merits of licence arrangements which provide access for the whole of the HE sector. There have been initiatives of this kind in a number of countries, including Germany, Ireland and Canada. The widespread view among university librarians in the UK, however, is that the apportionment between them of the costs of such licences would best be achieved by top-slicing of their universities’ block grants from the