Working with Publishers: The Librarian’s Perspective
Mutual trust is key to a successful relationship between librarians and publishers. In our latest webinar, two library leaders from Thailand and India share their experiences of the “give and take” between both sides and unpack the multifaceted issue of consortium agreements.
The latest webinar in the De Gruyter Brill Asian series took place on Thursday 25th June. The speakers were Dr. Jomkwan Polparsi, Assistant President for Research and Innovation at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC), who chairs the Educational Resources and Technology Committee of the Association of Private Higher Education Institutions of Thailand (APHEIT) and the Thai Private University Libraries (ThaiPUL) Network, and Dr. Kishor Satpathy, Chief Librarian and Head, Library, Documentation & Information Science Division at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India, who has been actively involved in India’s One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) initiative.
The main theme of the webinar was how librarians work with publishers in the consortial context, when some very complex deals have to be negotiated and success depends on mutual trust.
Jomkwan Polparsi
Dr. Polparsi said that 2 million new students enrolled in Thai universities in 2025. Thailand has a strong private university sector (there are 70 private universities vs. 83 public universities), though the public universities recruit more than five times the number of students. However, after peaking in 2011, tertiary enrollment has declined in Thailand. Dr. Polparsi attributed this partly to economic factors, partly to the global diminishment of respect for university education that fake news has fostered. However, student recruitment in Thailand is still higher than in most South-East Asian countries, Indonesia being an exception.
“The APHEIT consortium has sought to address some of [Thai universities’] challenges by signing consortium deals that benefit all its member universities.”
As well as needing to drive higher student enrollment, Thai universities face other challenges: the higher demand for collaboration with industry; the practice of sustainability and its impact; the quest for international opportunities for academia and research; and the desire for greater global recognition of Thai academic achievements.
The APHEIT consortium has sought to address some of these challenges by signing consortium deals that benefit all its member universities. One of its key goals is also the advancement of digital literacy, a subject in which Dr. Polparsi is herself an authority. Under her leadership, UTCC Central Library became Thailand’s first member organization of UNESCO’s Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Alliance. She also named 13 international publishers who have worked closely with APHEIT to support its aims. De Gruyter Brill is prominent among these.
She went on to discuss AI in academia and how it can be a force for both good and ill. Her own role involves instructing library patrons in how to and how not to use AI sensibly and ethically in their teaching, learning and research. Many of the publishers she mentioned are developing or have already developed AI solutions that operate within their platforms and on the whole she feels they are beneficial.
You are currently viewing a placeholder content from YouTube. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
Kishor Satpathy
Dr. Satpathy focused especially on the ONOS initiative. Like Dr. Polparsi, he emphasized that both publishers and librarians are facing global pressures. The four main challenges he identified were escalating information costs; expanding research demands; the complexities of open access transformation; and AI-driven discovery, which “reshapes user expectations”. He said the key message is not that it is “vendor versus customer: it is a strategic partnership”.
“It is not vendor versus customer: it is a strategic partnership.”
In addition, India faces its own unique set of challenges: the massive year-on-year growth of research output; a diverse ecosystem; and a very diverse higher education community which has to accommodate huge disparities in funding.
Take-up of higher education is expanding rapidly in India: it has increased by 26.5% over the past ten years. Partly because of this and partly because of the country’s continuing respect for academic achievement, India is the world’s third-largest producer of scholarly publications—nearly 370,595 papers annually—with the second-fastest growth in article volume. Despite this, “access inequality remains India’s defining challenge”. ONOS goes a considerable way towards addressing this, by adopting a centralized national model that can democratize access for researchers in smaller institutions.
The full recording of the webinar can be found here!
[Title image by wildpixel/ iStock/Getty Images Plus]