ABSTRACT
Marx shows that librarians are in a position not simply to interpret the world of scholarly communication, but to change it, or at least to act as the midwives of that change. In scholarly communication, the editorial and refereeing process creates authority, and is concentrated at the level of the title. For instance, the law of copyright for printed works is complex but generally well understood by librarians in terms of fair dealing for research or private study. Library budgets would be hard pressed to match this spending, so publishers' reluctance to make textbooks available as e-books to libraries is quite understandable. In the United Kingdom (UK) higher education negotiations with publishers for electronic content began in 1995 with the Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI). This set the model for later big deals' negotiated by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative.
