Columbia University Libraries takes seriously its role to expend University resources responsibly. The Libraries is committed to ensuring access to all users regardless of ability and to holding vendors accountable for maintaining sustainable acquisitions models. The Libraries uses its prominent leadership voice in the community to advocate for effective business relationships with vendors and for affordable enhancements to their products and services. 

To these ends, the Libraries strives to ensure that licensing agreements are evaluated against several criteria, including but not limited to:

• contracts must conform to all applicable laws of the State of New York;

• licenses for journals must allow for inter-library loans (ILL) without restrictions on electronic provision or geographic boundaries (i.e., must allow for international ILL);

• must not contain confidentiality clauses or other restrictions on sharing information about pricing and terms with stakeholders and external parties;

• vendors must ensure their products protect the privacy of our patrons;

• must not restrict Fair Use under the United States’ Copyright Law;

• authorized users include Columbia’s students, faculty, researchers, visiting scholars, staff, walk-in, and other authorized users across all Columbia University locations;

• vendors must honor and value Columbia’s interests and core values with regards to equity, diversity, and inclusion, with practices and partnerships that ensure preservation and access to the widest range of cultural, scientific, and historical resources as possible;

• in the case of multi-year agreements, include an opt-out clause in the event of financial hardship;

• must provide COUNTER-compliant or other acceptable usage data;

• either remain silent on governing law or agree to governance by the laws of the State of New York;

• contract must be written in English; 

• vendors must clearly and accurately describe content made available and content under development;

• vendors and the Libraries must engage in honest, fair, transparent, and flexible negotiation about pricing, open access, rights management, and content/platform use and restrictions, with no hidden fees;

• annual price increases should remain predictable and sustainable; 

• vendors should offer a variety of acquisition models;

• quality metadata records should be made available to ensure that content acquired/subscribed to is discoverable by Columbia users;

• should adhere to the U.S. Access Board’s final rule on accessibility requirements for information and communication technology, covered under Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act, and follow guidelines set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative;

• should be compliant with the NISO Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) Recommended Practice and be registered in the SERU Registry;

• should permit electronic course packs and e-reserves, and should allow Columbia to use proxy servers to provide access to library collections to authorized users;

• should include provision allowing authorized users to download, extract, store, and index content for the purposes of Text and Data Mining (TDM) for non-commercial, non-consumptive research purposes, and should include provision that will permit the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by authorized users for any and all legal purposes that support non commercial research, teaching, learning, and equitable access to information;

• allowance for Columbia University to deposit at no cost the final version of works from all faculty, staff, and students into the University’s institutional repository upon publication, including the products of federally-funded research mandated to be openly accessible to the public.

Library branding is more important than the vendor's or publisher's corporate brands. Our users' experiences indicate a lack of awareness that they are using library-supported, library-acquired resources. Our continued funding for electronic resources and our ability for continued business with vendors and publishers hinges on the following branding characteristics, practices, and principles:

• it is critical that Columbia University Libraries’ branding be prominent and consistent across all of our web properties and services.

• the Libraries expects the option to place prominent branding (preferably a Columbia University Libraries banner) on vendor and publisher pages and services, per the options and requirements outlined by the Libraries;

• advertising should not be placed on pages or services associated with library resources. For the avoidance of doubt, this does not include advertising that is part of the content itself, such as ads found within journals, magazines, archival or primary source material, etc.;

• the Libraries’ banner should be the main and largest branding/logo on the page;

• the Libraries’ banner should have top left presence, above any vendor, publisher, or product logos or branding;

• the Libraries’ banner should be accessible across all pages of the e-resource(s);

• the Libraries’ banner should be clickable back to Libraries’ home page, https://library.columbia.edu/.

• a link to "Ask a Columbia Librarian" should be on the site, https://resolver.library.columbia.edu/lweb0031.

Our strategic goal in making these criteria publicly available is to increase transparency to the Columbia and wider research library communities, and to communicate to our vendor partners the values and expectations to which we hold both ourselves and our vendors accountable. We invite anyone who identifies that a resource is not in compliance with the elements within this checklist to contact the Collection Strategies Division.