From the JIBS licensing event

3. 3
Extending ejournal access
for the NHS -
the King’s College London
experience
AnnaFranca–SubscriptionsandAccessManager
Anna.Franca@kcl.ac.uk
AlanFricker–LibraryLiaisonManager(NHS)
Alan.Fricker@kcl.ac.uk

4. 4
Summary
• Past: NHS staff had the same access to
academic resources as King’s College staff
• Loss of access resulting from transition to print to
electronic = increasing dissatisfaction and
unhappiness
• Present: Taking steps to improve access to
academic journals

5. 5
King’s Health Partners
• One of 5 AHSCs established in 2009
• Comprised of King’s College London, Guy’s and St
Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT), King’s
College Hospital Foundation Trust (KCHT), South
London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLAM)
• King’s College provides the library service for two of
the partners in KHP – GSTT and KCHT

6. 6
Happy days
• NHS staff attached
to King’s College
Libraries have
excellent access to
paper journals
– 2754 STM titles and
477 metres of stock
disposed of through
UKRR over the last
5 years

7. 7
Transition
• Shift from print journals to
ejournals took hold in the mid-
1990s as libraries have
increasing access to the WWW
• Excellent onsite access to
journals across formats
• Sneakernet (aka walking to the
library for electronic access)
Extending ejournal access for the NHS – the King’s College London experience

8. 8
An electronic world
• Transition of vast majority of STM to ejournals
• UKRR removes legacy collections so NHS staff can
no longer consult the print in the library
• Move from a position of equal access to one of
disparity
• Changing user expectations – remote is norm
• Frustrations in NHS / HE not just ejournals but wider
infrastructure (wifi / networks etc)

9. 9
NHS Procurement (in England)
• Local efforts to adopt early options for ejournal
access
• KA24 / regional purchasing (early 2000s)
• National Core Content (April 2003 first
resources)
• Transition in NHS libraries (LHL Strategic
Direction 2010-13 aimed for e-only primarily by
Jan 2014)

10. 10
NHS HE procurement
• NHS HE Forum 2002 onwards
– Users First (2003) report by John Thornhill pre-empts much
that follows:
• develop joint HE/NHS licensing
• longer contracts – monitored
• joint working at all levels
• explore common authentication
• local and national initiatives
• publicise good practice
– Two attempts at joint procurement did not succeed
– Hill Report (2008) “great advantages in the NHS and HE
working together on joint procurement.”

11. 11
London Medical Schools Procurement
Group
• First established in 2008
• Imperial, KCL, QMUL, UCL, St Georges
• Consortial purchasing arrangement with the aim of
extending access to affiliated NHS Trusts
• Pragmatic and focussed on a small number of key
resources
• JISC Collections manages negotiations and licensing

12. 12
AHSC Pilot 2011-2012
• Participants
– Cambridge, UCL, Imperial, KCL, Manchester University
– Anonymous, Elsevier, Springer, Nature PG, Thomson Reuters
– Pilot based on neutral pricing
• Key lessons learned
– Licensing issues
– Low level of NHS usage relative to HEI (0.5%)
– Proposed business model: no charge for NHS trusts unless usage
in current year exceeds 10%
• Provided the background for current work

13. 13
Access for the NHS at KCL
• Walk in access to King’s eresource subscriptions via
NHS account
• NHS OpenAthens (National, Regional, LMSPG,
local)
• Affiliate status granted to some NHS staff
• Hard to explain
• Hard to promote
• Complicated and unsatisfactory

14. 14
Unhappiness expressed
• GMC Survey (think NSS for Doctors in training) had
red triangles for access to educational resources
• South London NHS Library Users Survey
– Ejournals Top priority for improvement
– Multiple critical comments
• Customer Services staff receive regular negative
feedback
• Tough time at committees

15. 15
Move to action
• Discussions with NHS commissioners
• Survey of education leads (helped by DME)
– Nearly 400 recommendations
– Most wanted (Elsevier, Wiley, LWW, BMJ, OUP, Springer)
• More outreach needed
– Some titles already available (LWW Total Access)
– Need to login to MyJournals poorly understood
• Decide to advance by extending NESLI deals

16. 16
Making the case
• Aim to extend and rationalise King’s ejournal
licences
• For many years King’s journal subscriptions
covered both educational and NHS use
• Extensions not additional or new subscriptions
• Small relative usage – demonstrated by data
harvested from AHSC pilot

17. 17
How did we get on?
• Agreements with several publishers
• Mixture of pilots and purchases
• Some new licences (NEJM.org)
• Resulting in 5,400 additional titles being made
available via OpenAthens
• Discussions with further publishers in the pipeline
• Gaps remain – limitation of extensions

18. 18
Not all plain sailing (despiteAHSC work)
• Link resolver
– Holdings mismatches
– OCLC vs SFX
• Authentication
– Historic OrgIDs
– Publisher system issues (multiple OrgIDs / collections)
– Spelling’s
– KCL, KCH, KHP
• Unexplainable variations
• Promotion challenge remains

19. 19
Early impact
• Statistics
– Early days
– Not easy
– Consistent with AHSC pilot
• Happy users
– Good engagement
– Happy committee

20. 20
Interaction with Finch
• Finch Report recommended licence extensions for the NHS:
“In the health sector, there is scope for increasing and
rationalising arrangements for licensed access across the
NHS, and greater coordination with the HE sector”
• Part of the context for our discussions
• National one-year pilot due for April 2014 with the aim of
assessing levels of usage
• Pressure to move faster

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The future?
• Evaluate impact
• Refine current provision
• Long term funding?
• Examine other eresources (ebooks?)
• Potential of King’s Health Partners?
• Extension (where relevant) is the new norm?

22. 22
Questions?

23. 23
Further reading
• AHSC Pilot Report (2012) https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Reports/AHSC-
Pilot-Report-August-2012/
• Cumbers, B., Urquhart, C. and Durbin, J. (2006), Evaluation of the KA24
(Knowledge Access 24) service for health- and social-care staff in London and
the south-east of England. Part 1: quantitative. Health Information & Libraries
Journal, 23: 133–139. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-1842.2006.00651.x
• Spink, S., Urquhart, C., Cox, A. ; Higher Education Academy - Information and
Computer Sciences Subject Centre. (2007). Procurement of electronic content
across the UK National Health Service and Higher Education sectors. Report to
JISC executive and LKDN
executive. http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/handle/2160/310
• Thornhill, J. (2003) Users First http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/usersfirst.pdf
• Urquhart, C. J., Cox, A. M.; Spink, S. (2007). Collaboration on procurement of e-
content between the National Health Service and higher education in the UK.
Interlending &Document Supply, 35(3), 164-170
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/handle/2160/511