The consortium of Dutch universities, the Dutch Royal Library and the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information have summer 1999 developed and implemented a new strategy in its relationship to scientific publishing houses.

The gist of the strategy is that the consortium in discussing license agreements for scholarly journals has given priority to fundamental strategic issues over negotiating financial terms. Fundamental issues include copyright and exploitation rights in relation to university (pre-print) document servers, and experimenting with new business models for a distributed electronic publishing environment. Such a business model should take into account cashflow both ways between universities and publishers.

The strategy will be discussed in detail and first negotiation results of negotiations with main publishers will be reported.

Hans E. Roosendaal
DINKEL Institute
University of Twente, the Netherlands
P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede, the Netherlands
h.e.roosendaal@esic.utwente.nl