Access Copyright is now offering two licensing options for universities to consider: the Access Premium, which takes the same form as the pre-2015 blanket licences including course packs and digital copying, and transactional licences for over-limit copying; and the Access Choice, which starts at a lower flat rate and adds on transactional licences for course packs and digital copyright. (Still no stand-alone pay-per-use option, however.)

The flat fee for each of the options is reduced if the licence term is longer. For Premium, a one-year commitment requires a fee of $18 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student, which then drops to $15/year for a three-year agreement, and $12/year for a five-year agreement. The Choice option starts at $6/FTE for a one-year agreement, then drops to $5/year for a three-year agreement. (The previous agreement was $26/year.)

The addition of transactional licences to the scheme might be attractive to some university administrators who perceive it to offer some security. However, it doesn’t seem to be attractive enough. December 31, 2015, marked the end of the latest round of Access Copyright licences. I have been keeping track of whether the signatory universities were planning to continue with a further Access Copyright agreement. The results so far show that universities are continuing to move away from the blanket licence model, even with the lower price and option of transactional licences; more and more universities are opting to rely on fair dealing and other user rights, publisher and database licences, open access alternatives, and public domain material.

As of today, according to publicly-accessible sources, 37 out of 65 universities (57%) are not a party to a licensing agreement with the collective (compared to 24/65 [37%] last year, and 100% in 2010). For 27 universities, their status is unclear, but evidence suggests that two of them have decided not to renew. The University of Regina decided to opt into an Access Premium agreement.