dec08b.indd


scholarly communication 

Clinton K. Chamberlain 

Breaking the bottleneck 
Using SERU to facilitate the acquisition of electronic resources 

Earlier this year, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) adopted 
the Shared Electronic Resource Understand­
ing (SERU) as a NISO Recommended Practice. 
SERU was developed to serve as an alterna­
tive to license agreements, which are often 
time­consuming and costly for both libraries 
and publishers, and can impede the timely 
acquisition of electronic resources. What fol­
lows is a brief overview of SERU and how 
it may be used to facilitate the electronic 
resource acquisitions process. 

History 
Spearheaded by Judy Luther (Informed Strate­
gies) and Selden Lamoureaux (University of 
North Carolina­Chapel Hill), SERU began as 
a kernel of an idea in 2005 when Luther and 
Lamoureaux realized that both publishers 
and librarians were frustrated by the time­
consuming and costly process of drafting and 
negotiating license agreements. At several 
conferences held between 2005 and 2006, 
Luther and Lamoureaux discussed the idea 
in a variety of venues with publishers and 
librarians. It soon became evident that there 
was widespread interest in finding an alterna­
tive to licensing. 

There was general recognition that al­
though license agreements made sense in 
the early days of electronic resource trans­
actions, which involved expensive content 
and partners with no experience with the 
requirements for the provision and acquisi­
tion of electronic resources, industry norms 
have matured while both publishers and 
librarians have gained substantial experience. 
In addition, more publishers are provid­

ing more online content, which in turn has 
resulted in more license agreements. Nego­
tiation of license agreements has become a 
burdensome routine, and many librarians 
and publishers desire a return to the kind of 
nonlitigious relationship that had been part 
of the long history of cooperation between 
the two parties. 

In 2006, a group sponsored by NISO was 
created and tasked with the responsibility 
of investigating common licensing practices 
to determine commonly agreed­upon con­
cepts. It was hoped that best practices for 
implementation of these concepts could be 
identified. The group members were drawn 
from varying sizes of U.S. academic libraries, 
as well as different types of publishers. The 
group also included representation from a 
subscription agent and a consortium, in ad­
dition to members who had been trained 
in legal matters. After an initial meeting in 
October 2006, the NISO Working Group 
created a document that ultimately would 
become SERU.1 

Shared understandings 
The NISO Working Group met with the as­
sumption that shared expectations had devel­
oped among librarians and publishers around 
a core group of issues related to the acquisi­

Contact Joyce L. Ogburn—series editor, cochair of 
the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee, 
and university librarian at the University of Utah— 
with article ideas, e-mail: joyce.ogburn@utah.edu 

Clinton K. Chamberlain is coordinator for electronic 
resource acquisitions at the University of Texas-Austin, 
e-mail: c.chamberlain@austin.utexas.edu 
© 2008 Clinton K. Chamberlain 

C&RL News December 2008  700 

mailto:c.chamberlain@austin.utexas.edu
mailto:joyce.ogburn@utah.edu


tion and provision of electronic resources.2 

This core of issues forms the basis of the 
SERU statements of common understanding. 
These statements are written in such a way 
as to address many of the same issues that 
license agreements cover, but with emphasis 
on widely accepted practices rather than ex­
ceptions or special circumstances. 

In addition, a deliberate decision was 
made to eschew legal language, and the 
statements are written in vernacular language 
to the extent possible. In addition to making 
the statements of common understanding 
easier to understand, the use of such broad 
statements and language allows SERU the 
flexibility to be used with a wide variety 
of transactions and to accommodate new 
developments. 

The NISO Working Group identifi ed the 
following seven areas of agreement: 

• the subscription, 
• the subscribing institution and its au­

thorized users, 
• use of materials, 
• inappropriate use, 
• confidentiality and privacy, 
• online performance and service provi­

sion, and 
• archiving and perpetual access. 
For each of these areas, common un­

derstandings were identified and proposed 
for publishers and libraries to reference 
in lieu of formal license agreements. For 
example, the section on “Use of Materials” 
draws upon the most common and gener­
ally agreed upon uses of subscribed content 
as governed by applicable copyright law, 
without spelling out every permissible use 
in the manner of some license agreements. 
Likewise, a generally agreed upon standard 
for defining subscriptions was identifi ed: the 
subscribing institution gains the right to use 
the subscribed content for a specifi ed period 
of time upon payment of a fee, the publisher 
has the right to provide the content to the 
subscribing institution, and a subscription 
provides access to the subscribing institution 
and its authorized users. These are all widely 
accepted ideas related to subscriptions and 

use of content that can mitigate time­consum­
ing negotiations. 

The current iteration of the SERU state­
ments is available on the NISO Web site.3 In 
addition to the statements outlined above, 
the document includes guidelines for imple­
menting SERU. 

How SERU works 
In some ways, SERU functions as a sort of 
handshake based on mutual trust and good 
will. When both parties to a transaction agree 
to apply SERU to that transaction, they affi rm 
that they will follow the practices set forth in 
the SERU documentation without recourse to 
a signed and negotiated license agreement. 

Publishers who wish to use the SERU 
approach when selling some or all of their 
content may sign up on the SERU registry, 
as may libraries who wish to use SERU when 
acquiring content from selected publishers. 
Signing the registry indicates both parties’ 
willingness to rely on the expressions of 
shared expectations as listed in SERU, but it 
does not bind the parties to use this document 
with all resources or with all transactions. 
Publishers may also indicate to their subscrip­
tion agents and their customers when they are 
willing to forego license agreements and use 
SERU, while libraries may wish to inquire at 
the beginning of the acquisitions process as 
to whether SERU may be used. 

When a library decides to acquire a prod­
uct and there is mutual agreement between 
library and publisher to accept SERU, the 
library will generate a purchase order and 
make payment. The purchase order should 
include specific business terms of sale, includ­
ing price and duration of access. Because 
there is no license to be signed, SERU may 
be referenced in the purchase order so that 
the terms of the agreement can be noted. 
When both parties to a transaction can 
quickly agree to reference SERU rather than 
engage in negotiation of a license, substantial 
savings of time and effort can accrue to both 
parties; indeed, this can also speed access 
to an electronic resource for the subscribing 
institution’s users. 

December 2008  701 C&RL News 



It should be stressed that SERU is not a 
one­size­fits­all approach. Because the SERU 
statements are intended to articulate common 
(but not necessarily universal) practices, they 
will not fit every circumstance. Instead, SERU 
is intended as an alternative to license agree­
ments when such an alternative makes sense 
to both parties to a transaction. 

Some parties may not be comfortable 
dealing in high­cost or high­risk transactions 
without a license agreement, while others 
may be required by their general counsel 
to negotiate licenses for all purchases, no 
matter the cost or perceived risk. If either 
party is uncomfortable with using the SERU 
approach (or should either party seek to 
make changes to the SERU), then a negotiated 
license may be more appropriate to complete 
the transaction. The SERU FAQ provides ad­
ditional suggestions as to how SERU may be 
implemented.4 

Implementing SERU 
As noted earlier, SERU was adopted as a 
NISO Recommended Best Practice early in 
2008. The SERU statements of practice are 
available at the NISO Web site.5 This site also 
provides many other resources, including an 
FAQ, links to relevant articles that provide 
more detail on SERU, and details on the 
aforementioned SERU Registry as well as 
instructions for joining a electronic list de­
voted to discussion, advice, and information 
about SERU. 

The first step toward implementing SERU 
is to determine whether such an approach 
would work for your institution or company 
by reading through the statements, FAQ, and 
associated articles and presentations linked 
from NISO’s SERU page. If applicable, join 
the SERU Registry and discussion list. 

Publishers should let potential custom­
ers know if they would prefer to use SERU 
instead of a license agreement for a given 
transaction, and librarians should ask pub­
lishers if SERU could be invoked when 
engaged in preliminary discussions. If either 
party is unfamiliar with the SERU approach, 
they should be directed to the appropriate 

documentation at NISO’s Web site. Through 
using SERU, both publishers and librarians 
may be able to sidestep the laborious licens­
ing process, thereby freeing up valuable time 
and reducing the high costs associated with 
license negotiations. 

Notes 
1. Maria Collins, “SERU: An Alternative to 

Licensing—An Interview with Selden Dur­
gom Lamoureaux,” Serials Review 33:2 (June 
2007), 122–28. 

2. Karla Hahn, “SERU (Shared Electronic 
Resource Understanding): Opening Up New 
Possibilities for Electronic Resource Transac­
tions,” D-Lib Magazine 13:11/12 (Novem­
ber/December 2007), www.dlib.org/dlib 
/november07/hahn/11hahn.html. 

3. See www.niso.org/publications/rp 
/RP­7­2008.pdf. 

4. SERU FAQ can be found at www.niso. 
org/workrooms/seru/statementFAQ/. 

5. NISO Web site is at www.niso.org 
/workrooms/seru. 

(Periodical indexes . . .” continued from 
page 676) 
of charm in these “kitschy” and seemingly 
outdated activities; it’s such a drastic change 
of pace for many of them that they respond 
reasonably well to the assignments, and 
many even get legitimately excited about the 
idea of holding in their hands a book that is 
hundreds of years old, or seeing a citation 
to an article that was published before their 
grandparents were born. 

In a course that meets only once a week 
for one hour at a time, it is important to 
incorporate activities that have maximum 
impact. Nudging the students into the unfa­
miliar galaxy of print indexes is an example 
of one such activity. Not only are the students 
physically engaged in a tactile and unfamiliar 
learning environment, but the activity also 
provides students with a new lens through 
which they can understand modern infor­
mation principles—even from the edge of 
time. 

C&RL News December 2008  702 

http:www.niso.org
www.niso
www.niso.org/publications/rp
www.dlib.org/dlib