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Options 1 and 2 would be the least expensive, as the society would not incur a cost for digitizing additional volume years. However, Option 1 has risks and limitations. Closing the JSTOR window entirely could put some marginal journal subscriptions at risk. Some academic institutions that have access to JSTOR, but have a relatively weak demand for the journal, might be under sufficient budget pressure to accept an effective one-year embargo and cancel their subscriptions. This risk will be greatest for disciplines in which articles retain currency over time, such as the social sciences, humanities, and many of the non-medical or technical sciences. Reviewing article citation half-life reports will help a society determine the average point at which usage begins to drop off. As budget pressures on academic libraries increase, more libraries might cancel their separate subscriptions and rely entirely on JSTOR. Retiring the online coverage gap incrementally over several years would not incur any additional costs and would not put a journal’s institutional subscriptions at risk.

Continuing access

Under a print regime, an institutional library owns a copy of any journal to which it subscribes. With an online subscription hosted by the publisher or a third party, the library effectively leases the content, and continued access is a contractual issue between the library and the publisher.

Academic libraries now typically demand perpetual access to the journal content to which they subscribe online. This reflects the expectation that online subscriptions convey the same perpetual access rights as print subscriptions. Approximately 75% of large publishers and medium-size publishers, and 50% of small publishers, offered continuing online access to former subscribers. Cox and Cox (2008), 57. Therefore, a journal’s license terms should stipulate that, should a library cancel its online subscription, it will continue to have access to the content to which it subscribed at the time of cancellation. Rather than develop its own license, a society might consider participating in the NISO Shared E-Resource Understanding ( (External Link) ), which includes a clause addressing perpetual access and archiving. Some publishers charge former subscribers a relatively modest annual access fee for ongoing access to un-subscribed content.

Given the uncertainty of future online access formats, many online licenses provide for the publisher, in the event of cancellation, to provide the library either with perpetual online access to the previously licensed material, or with a file of the content on some portable storage medium. (The latter approach is less elegant than online access, but it does provide an option of last resort.) Sometimes a society’s online publishing partner will be able to provide ongoing online access to lapsed subscribers, either directly or through participation in Portico or LOCKSS, as described below.

The continuing access policy described above applies to libraries. In most instances, a society would not apply the same policy to individual members. Most societies have many more individual members than institutional subscribers, and individual membership turns over faster than library subscriptions. Therefore, not providing perpetual access to members will help the society retain members in the long run and avoid the expense (and liability) of administering perpetual access to hundreds, even thousands, of lapsed members.

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Source:  OpenStax, Transitioning a society journal online: a guide to financial and strategic issues. OpenStax CNX. Aug 26, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11222/1.1
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