Publishers and academic associations offer electronic full texts, but these are for the most part not freely available. Goportis aims to make these full texts conveniently available. To this end, the partners cooperate in negotiating contracts with the publishers. These licences then provide the basis on which full texts are made available to all interested customers – either for a fee or at no charge.

Goportis coordinates and continuously expands the scope of content licensed for full text service. It is currently working to find pay-per-view or pay-per-use solutions that will give access to material subject to fees. Parallel to this, the three German National Libraries in the field of Science and Technology (TIB), Medicine (ZB MED) and Economics (ZBW) are cooperating with other partners to find solutions for national access to content by means of DFG (German Research Association)-funded national licences  as well as within the framework of the Alliance of German Science Organizations.

The basis for direct access to electronic full texts is clarification of access qualification. Only a very small proportion of existing articles are freely available in electronic versions. The electronic full texts are generally subject to access restrictions, resulting in costs for access. The objective of Goportis is to make these contents as widely available as possible using the full text service instruments  of its partners. For this, licensing contracts must be signed with the providers. From the users’ point of view, these licences can be divided into two categories: campus licences and pay-per-view or pay-per-use licences.

Campus licences
Full texts acquired by licences that are made available to users at no charge must still be paid for. These licensing costs are usually borne by the institutions to which users belong. Synergy effects can be achieved, and negotiating influence enhanced, by centralizing the licence negotiations. Within the framework of the Alliance Priority Initiative “Digital Information”, the working group “National Licensing” is working to negotiate national licences for the German scientific community in which individual institutions can participate. The goal is to reduce the licensing costs for each institution. At the same time, the licence contracts should integrate aspects such as national hosting and distribution of references.

For those publications published by authors from the participating institutions in the licensed journals, permission is sought to archive them additionally in repositories, in the original layout whenever possible, and thus make them freely available. Since 2004, the DFG has been funding national licences for complete databases and journal archives, as well as a pilot project to develop licensing models for continuously updated full text collections. There are also international initiatives for multinational licensing.  The Goportis partners bundle their competences and capacities to participate in national and international initiatives, resulting in further intensification of the centralization process with, currently, nine negotiating institutions. Cooperative negotiations produce better, more transparent results while at the same time reducing negotiating efforts.


Pay-per-view / pay-per-use
Whereas the development of national licensing models in cooperation with the DFG and other scientific institutions focuses on research and teaching, the Goportis partners also work on solutions to make full texts available for the commercial sector, both for companies with many users as well as for individual employees. The objective of Goportis is integrated availability of full texts from various publishers and other providers to all user and customer groups. These full texts are distributed directly using the partners’ document delivery systems.

The corresponding pay-per-view / pay-per-use licences are negotiated in a joint effort by the partners. The contracts in question may have relevance for all fields represented by the three partners, or just for a particular subject. With these licences, Goportis can offer access to the desired full texts in electronic form to all users whenever needed. In these negotiations in particular, the enhanced negotiating influence, bundling of negotiating competences and efficient central management of negotiations combine to make for a significant advantage to Goportis and the users.

Access for individual users need not cost anything, since the user’s institution can pay by means of pay-per-view or pay-per-use here as well – either in the form of a monthly bill for all downloads from the source provider or by paying in advance for given allotments.