Knowledge exchange multinational licensing tender: An evaluation

The Knowledge Exchange initiative was founded in 2005 by four European organizations active in promoting and funding developments in information and communication technology (ICT) in the higher education and research sector of their respective countries: Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF), the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: DFG) in Germany, the joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom, and the Dutch SURFfoundation.The partner organizations share a common goal to make a layer of scholarly and scientific content openly available on the Internet. Within the Knowledge Exchange, the partners recently embarked on a collaborative project procuring digital content in a multi-national framework. This article sketches the process and weighs the advantages and disadvantages of the chosen procedure. It also presents a discussion on whether this joint effort is worth repeating. Article