Jennifer Watson, You Get What You Pay for? Archival Access to Electronic Journals, Serials Review, July 5, 2005. Abstract: 'An increasing number of libraries are canceling their print journal subscriptions and subscribing to journals in purely electronic format. With the print version of a journal, when the subscription is cancelled, the library retains all the earlier issues of the journal to which it subscribed. With the online version, this may not be the case. A library canceling an online subscription may lose all access to the journal, including issues for which access had previously been paid. The author describes the policies and practices of selected e-journal vendors and libraries in relation to archival access.'
Comment. This problem does not arise for OA journals. Where it arises for priced journals, the publishers are short-sighted. Publishers may be counting on it as incentive for libraries not to cancel their subscriptions. But they are forgetting that it's an even stronger incentive for libraries to support alternatives to the journal business models that give publishers this kind of power to harm libraries, researchers, and research.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/16/2005 05:54:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
