In February 2025, COMMUNIA invited licensing managers from public and academic libraries across Europe to a meeting in Brussels to share their experiences in licensing digital resources for education, research and community development. This report details the obstacles identified by the licensing managers during the meeting.
In addition to the experiences of licensing managers, the report contains clauses from a variety of licensing agreements offered by publishers to public and academic libraries in Europe. Together they provide evidence of the unequal bargaining power in negotiations between publishers and libraries seeking to acquire digital resources, such as e-books, e-journals and databases under fair and reasonable terms, and the difficulties this entails for access to knowledge.
