Preservation of Access to Subscription Electronic Journals in
Australian University Libraries : a Discussion Paper for the
CAUL Electronic Information Resources Committee
Christine Maher
David Groenewegen
Gail James
November 2002
Executive Summary
Arrangements for preserving access to electronic journals currently or formerly subscribed to
by Australian university libraries are very unsatisfactory. Trends for publishers to build and
maintain their own archives involve serious dangers for both the publishers and libraries; but
the magnitude of the task is such that individual libraries will be unable to provide long-term
solutions on their own. Long-term (defined as at least 100 years) access preservation is
contingent on the development of new arrangements for electronic archiving, which will
require collaboration between libraries and publishers in order to be technically and
financially sustainable.
It is recommended that CEIRC and CAUL sponsor further research and a project to examine
the feasibility, security effectiveness, cost effectiveness and intellectual property implications
of “within Australia” third party arrangements and to compare the cost effectiveness and
security of such arrangements with projected collaborative electronic archives hosted
overseas.
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Preservation of Access to Subscription Electronic Journals in Australian
University Libraries : a Discussion Paper
This paper started life as a response to the concerns expressed by CAUL Datasets
Coordinators at meetings over the last two years that the licence provision arrangements for
continuing access to subscription electronic journals after cancellation of titles were in many
instances manifestly inadequate for maintenance of long-term access to the subscribed
materials, even though many licence agreements promise to ensure ongoing access to
cancelled e-titles. Tony Millett’s paper1 for CEIRC outlines the considerable variations from
publisher to publisher in the licence arrangements for continuing access to e-journals after
cancellation and substantiates the concerns of the Datasets Coordinators.
It quickly became apparent to the authors that preservation of access to e-journals whether as
cancelled or ongoing subscriptions, is dependent on the successful archiving and
preservation of e-journal content. Flecker points out that “The issue of long-term archiving and
preservation of e-journal content has become one of increasing importance” to research libraries. He
further comments that concerns about the archiving of e-journals have retarded the move
from print to electronic-only subscriptions at the same time that duplication of print and
electronic journals is unlikely to be sustainable over time. 2 Raym Crow states in his paper
for SPARC on Institutional Repositories that “Digital preservation and long-term access are
inextricably linked : each being largely meaningless without the other.” 3
Continuity of access to e-journals looks to be increasingly problematic regardless of whether a
library cancels or continues to subscribe to particular titles. Publishers of e-journals have
assumed de facto archiving responsibilities for these journals and the high costs of doing so
may endanger their commercial viability. The U.K. Dept. of Trade and Industry Report
“Publishing in the knowledge economy; competitiveness analysis of the UK publishing media sector”
sees the “cost of maintaining a digital archive” as a threat to the existence of the journal
publishing industry.4 Examples of publishers undertaking archiving of their own e-journals
are American Chemical Society, Elsevier Science and Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers.
Australian academic libraries in the past few years have invested very large sums of money
in subscriptions to electronic journals. As long as the e-journals merely duplicated existing
print subscriptions issues of continuity of access and archival responsibilities seemed not to
be very pressing, because the libraries still relied on the print copy to be the archival copy.
Similarly, ambiguities about whether libraries are leasing (access only for the duration of the
“Survey of Database Providers’ policies regarding continued access to full-text databases for the
period subscribed to following cancellation of subscriptions” 2001.
http://www.anu.edu.au/caul/dataset$/LicenseAgreementAuthorisations.xls
2
Dale Flecker. “Preserving Scholarly E-journals”, D-Lib Magazine, Vol 7 (9) September 2001
3
The Case for Institutional Repositories : a SPARC Position Paper , Release 1.0 p18-19. At :
http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html
4
See : U.K. Department of Trade and Industry. http://www.uk-publishing.info/competitive.asp#main
1
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subscription) or licensing (implying an ongoing right of access to content) e-journals when
they subscribe seemed not to matter as long as the print copy was still available.
In an environment where financial exigency combined with end-user demand for e-journal
access anywhere at anytime is compelling many Australian academic libraries to cancel print
subscriptions and rely entirely on electronic versions of journals, ensuring that these libraries
have long-term (defined as at least for 100 years) access to the material that they have paid for
has now become of utmost concern and is the key issue to be examined in this paper.
Archiving
Archiving can involve three different but related issues. This paper does not attempt to
address all the problems and issues related to these areas, so some definitions are in order to
make the focus of the paper clear:
1.
Digital preservation is concerned with ensuring that material created or stored in a
digital format is able to be accessed in the future. The rapid advances in computing
technology over the past twenty years have shown that:
 Storage formats become outmoded, and therefore inaccessible. A commonly used
example are the 5 ¼ inch floppy discs, which were in common use during the 80s
and early 90s, but which are as good as useless because modern PCs no longer
come with the correct drive installed.
 Operating systems become obsolete, making programs difficult to run, and
thereby making the information inaccessible. Many DOS based programs suffer
from this problem in modern operating environments.
 Hardware becomes outmoded, and thereby prevents access to information. A
recent example of this has been NASA’s reliance on early 80s computer parts to
run the Space Shuttle program (http://www.iht.com/articles/57527.html).
 Software changes, which can affect the way that information is viewed or
accessed. This can be a common problem with web pages, which were designed
to run on a particular browser version. Information may be lost or rendered
unreadable if viewed in a different browser, or even a different version of the
same browser.
Strategies for addressing these problems are referenced in the bibliography at the end
of this paper; however, preserving material is not the primary focus of this paper.
2.
Access efficiencies are concerned with making it easier and cheaper to access
electronic material. This may involve creating a mirror site (i.e. a duplicate site, which
contains all the same material) within Australia, so that Internet traffic costs are
reduced, and access is (theoretically) quicker. This mirror site would have the
potential to act as an archive (as all relevant electronic material would be copied to
it), but this would not be its primary purpose. A mirror site would create its own
maintenance and licensing issues.
3.
Electronic archiving is defined, for the purposes of this paper, as ensuring ongoing
access to electronic material that has been paid for by Australian University libraries.
The issue of electronic archiving is complicated by the question of what level of archiving will
satisfy the needs of our clients and who assumes the responsibility and the costs of archiving.
1.
Ensuring that all scholarly information is preserved by someone, somewhere, is an
electronic equivalent of the mandatory deposit schemes of the past. The feasibility of
4
this is greatly affected by the digital preservation issues discussed earlier, and also by
the continuing existence of the publishers of the material, many of whom refuse to
allow archiving outside of their own organizations.
2.
Ensuring that Australian libraries have long-term access to material that they have
paid for. Where a subscription is cancelled, continuing access to the paid-for issues
of the e-journal is reliant on:
 The continued existence of the publisher, and its willingness to offer this service.
 The publisher actually being able to offer this service – when Monash tried to
enforce this at Ovid in early 2000 it became clear that Ovid weren’t quite sure
how this would actually work, and the solution was less than ideal, although it
has since improved.
 Equality of treatment by the publisher of current and cancelled subscriptions –
Elsevier have made clear that cancelled titles might not be eligible for the same
range of services as ongoing ones.
 Archival formats which may quickly become technologically obsolescent, e.g. cdroms as provided by Project Muse and EMERALD.
 Ability of libraries to pay additional archival access fees where these are required
by the publisher – this trend is increasingly evident e.g. American Chemical
Society. If this trend were to be generalised to most publishers of e-journals then
it is unlikely that many university libraries could sustain the costs in the longer
term, or at least while they are simultaneously continuing to act as long-term
repositories for books and print journals.
Ways Forward
A number of operational and research projects have identified a range of potential solutions
to the problem of who assumes responsibility for e-journal archiving and how to support the
likely fairly heavy costs involved.
Open Archiving
Open Archiving (sometimes known as E-Print Archives or repositories) has been mooted by
some as the long term solution to the problem. The essential theory of this movement is that
higher education and research bodies are paying for information twice – once to write it, and
again to obtain a journal subscription to enable other members of the institution to read it and
similar materials. In return they get a peer review process and distribution of their ideas, but
the feeling is that the costs are now outweighing the benefits of this system.
The current proposal is that these institutions should store electronic copies of all the research
publications of its staff on its own servers, or on general subject servers, and that these should
be made freely available to all. The assumption is that once enough institutions take this on,
all scholarly publications will be available to all scholars, and journal subscriptions will be
able to be cancelled, thus freeing up funds for the cost of the local archive. This movement is
gaining a good deal of momentum, but may not necessarily fulfil the library role as archivist
(as Michael Day pointed out5), and they rely on full compliance by all authors to make sure
every article is available –which may not be the case.
Relevant sites include:
 http://www.eprints.org/
 http://www.openarchives.org/
5
At : http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/metadata/
5
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http://www.arxiv.org/
Publisher Archives
One of the major dangers of relying on publisher e-journal archives has already been briefly
described above, i.e. the high cost of maintaining such an archive for a large suite of journals
and the resulting pressures on the commercial viability of the publishers undertaking such
archiving responsibility. The recent move by the American Chemical Society to require
separate payment of an annual subscription fee to its archive of e-journals on top of the
annual subscription fee to a rolling few years of the current issues of its journals is a potent
indicator of the sorts of costs which need to be covered in order to sustain the archive. Dual
subscriptions to maintain both the current access and archival access have budgetary
implications for libraries which call for further analysis and comment.
Another aspect to this process of publisher self-archiving is that some publishers are
digitising back files of their print titles and incorporating the newly digitised retrospective
material in the current subscriptions, whose prices then rise to reflect the cost to the publisher
of the retrospective digitisation. The danger arises where libraries have no choice in the
matter of whether they wish to subscribe to the retrospective electronic content or not. ACM
Digital Library appears to have taken this route and IEEE intends to follow suit.
Donald Waters, Co-Chair of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information created by
the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group, has also
identified another equally important concern with publisher archives and that is “whether the
material is in a preservable format and can endure outside the cocoon of the publisher’s proprietary
system”. Waters goes on to state that “One necessary ingredient in a proof of archivability is the
transfer of data out of their native home into an external archive, and as long as publishers refuse to
make such transfers, this proof cannot be made”.6
The lack of trust in publisher archives is also cited by Sarah Thomas as an outcome of an
informal Project Harvest( one of the Mellon Foundation funded projects) survey in which
“90% of respondents preferred multiple custodians rather than a single-party preserver” and “many
publishers were insufficiently aware that others did not trust them to archive materials responsibly or
to be the sole custodian of their output”. 7
Third Party Solutions
Waters comments elsewhere in the paper cited above that an unexpected outcome from the
Mellon Foundation projects on e-journal archiving is that “new organizations are likely going to
be necessary to act in the broad interest of the scholarly community and to mediate the interests of
libraries and publishers”. (p.87) In other words it is unlikely that either libraries acting on their
own or publishers acting on their own will be able to provide a sustainable solution to the
access and archiving issues.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation projects involve collaborations between a number of
stakeholder organisations who share the objective of finding cost-effective long term
archiving solutions for subscription electronic journals. These organisations include in the US
the Digital Library Federation, Council on Library and Information Resources and Coalition
6
Waters, Donald. Good Archives make good scholars: reflections on recent steps toward the archiving
of Digital Information. In “The state of digital preservation: an international perspective” Conference
Proceedings July 2002. http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub107/contents.html
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Thomas, Sarah. From Double Fold to Double Bind. Journal of Academic Librarianship, Vol 28, no.3,
p107
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for Networked Information. The Mellon Foundation has financed projects undertaken by
Cornell, Harvard, and Yale University libraries, the University of Pennsylvania Library, New
York Public Library and Stanford University Library. It is notable that several of these
projects involve collaboration with the publishers of the journals. Further details about the
projects can be found in the Appendix to this paper.
In the UK projects are under way under the auspices of the British Library Research and
Innovation Centre, JISC Committee for Electronic Information and JISC Preservation Focus
and the U.K. National Preservation Office. These projects and the Web addresses where
corresponding documentation may be found are also listed in the Appendix to this paper.
Costs of Long-Term Archiving of E-journals
A recently released report from one of the Mellon-sponsored projects, that undertaken by
Yale University Library in collaboration with Elsevier, entitled “YEA: the Yale Electronic
Archive, one year of progress” establishes that a collaborative e-journals archive is now
technically feasible, although significantly, issues of financial feasibility and sustainability
will become the object of investigation in the next phase of the project.8 The discussion in the
Chapter titled ”Some Economic Considerations” makes it clear that electronic archiving costs
are likely to be high to very high and that a range of payment models for users of archival ejournals will be required to support different levels and types of access. (p25-30)
Dorothy Warner cites the findings of the investigators of another Yale project, Project Open
Book, that the cost comparisons as between a traditional print library and digital archiving
only improved in favour of the latter if the digital archive was a distributed network-based
system and only in the 7th year of operation.9
The findings of the Yale Electronic Archive Project and Project Open Book and various other
investigations cited above in relation to costs lead to a number of conclusions :
1. The high costs of maintenance of an archive of e-journals substantiate Donald Waters’
statements about the need for collaborative third party arrangements in order to
preserve long-term access to subscription e-journals, i.e. no Library will be able to go
it alone.
2. Similarly, publishers on their own are unlikely to sustain the costs of long-term
preservation of and access to even their own e-journals and are likely anyway to fail
Water’s “archivability’ test as per comments cited above.
3. A network of distributed archives is likely to be more cost-effective than one big
depository.
4. A workable solution for Australian universities will require the use or development
of third parties who can meet the necessary criteria for cost-effective, technically
reliable, long-term access and who can offer the range of payment models which will
be necessary to provide the different levels and types of access which the differing
capacities and willingness of Australian university libraries to pay will require.
Licence Agreements
A long-term, financially sustainable solution to the problem of preservation of access to
subscription electronic journals will also require modification of many existing publisher
licence agreements, particularly if the “third party” arrangement is seen as the way to go.
8
See : YEA : the Yale Electronic Archive, one year of progress, at :
http://www.library.yale.edu/~okerson/yea
9
Warner, Dorothy “Why do we need to keep this in print? It’s on the Web…” Progressive Librarian,
Issue 19-20, Spring 2002. at : http://libr.org/PL/19-20_Warner.html
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Our Recommendations
 That CAUL sponsor a project to investigate the feasibility of collaborating
with credible Australian third parties such as CSIRO , National Library of
Australia and CAVAL to establish a long-term archive for electronic journals
subscribed to by Australian university libraries.
 That the CAUL Electronic Information Resources Committee (or their
delegates) investigate the comparative cost-effectiveness and security
effectiveness of “within Australia” archiving solutions for subscription ejournals and solutions which would potentially involve collaboration with
overseas-based credible third parties, such as OCLC, JSTOR and any of the
Mellon-funded organizations. ( Internet access costs are constantly increasing
at Australian universities and will bring increasing pressure to contain these
costs on all operational units of the universities, including their libraries)
 That any proposed co-operative or collaborative archive for Australian
universities’ subscription e-journals should conform with the “Minimum
Criteria for an Archival Repository of Digital Scholarly Journals” proposed
by the US Digital Library Federation and documented at :
http://www.diglib.org/preserve/criteriapv.htm
 That CEIRC sponsor further investigations into and reports on the
intellectual property aspects of long-term archiving of subscription
electronic journals.
Appendix - Select Directory of E-journal Archiving Projects and Related
Resources
U.S Preservation Projects
1) Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's e-Journal archiving programme.
(http://www.diglib.org/preserve/ejp.htm)
This programme is also sponsored by the Digital Library Federation, The Council on Library
and Information Resources and the Coalition for Networked Information. There are seven
ongoing Projects under the Mellon Programme :
 Cornell University Library, "Project Harvest : Developing a repository for e-journals.”
(http://www.diglib.org/preserve/cornellprop.htm). Proposes to build an archive of ejournals in the agricultural sciences., in collaboration with the major publishers of
these journals. The stated intention is to “ identify the elements of a compelling
preservation strategy and negotiate a mutually acceptable approach that Cornell could
implement and which the publishers could accept. As a product of the negotiations, we will
develop a model agreement that could be used as the basis for negotiations with other
publishers in agriculture as well as publishers in other disciplines.”
 Harvard University Library, (Jointly with Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley & Sons
and University of Chicago Press) "Proposal for a study of electronic journal
archiving". The final report states the objectives of this project as follows : “During
2001, Harvard University Library used its one-year planning grant for an electronic journal
archive from the Mellon Foundation to explore and define both the business and technical
issues of content, format and deposit mechanisms, access control and interface requirements,
long-term preservation guidelines, costs of development, operation and maintenance of the
working archive, and financial and governance models for a sustainable archive. The
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remainder of this report represents our research findings and current thinking on the design
of a publisher based e-journal archive.”
Final Report is at : http://www.diglib.org/preserve/harvardfinal.html
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, "Planning for an archive of dynamic
journals at MIT" (http://libraries.mit.edu/admin/mellon.htm) “The MIT Libraries'
proposed to the Mellon Foundation to plan a preservation archive for dynamic electronic
journals (DEJA -- Dynamic E-Journal Archive) that would be reliable, secure, enduring, and
sustainable over the long term. The Foundation's own request for proposals had previously
laid out that it was interested in preserving the wealth of research electronic journals
currently available to the scholarly community before it was too late.”
The report of 30th May 2002 entitled “DEJA: A Year in Review : Report on the
Planning Year Grant For the Design of a Dynamic E-journal Archive” can be found
at : http://www.diglib.org/preserve/mitfinal.html
New York Public Library, "Archiving performing arts journals : A planning project"
(http://www.diglib.org/preserve/nyplprop10-13-00.pdf)
Stanford University, "LOCKSS : a distributed digital archiving system". for a
description see : http://www.lockss.stanford.edu
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University of Pennsylvania Library, "Proposal for a planning grant for archiving and
preservation of electronic journals". (http://www.diglib.org/preserve/pennprop.htm)
“..the Penn Library proposes to establish a long-term digital archive for electronic journals, as
part of the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program. We intend to make arrangements
with selected publishers of electronic journals to archive their publications. We intend to set
up a system that can ensure their long-term accessibility. We intend to study how such
systems can be set up to effectively archive electronic journals at low cost. We intend to share
our findings, and (where permitted by applicable licenses) our archival systems and content,
with the broader library community.“

Yale University Library, "Proposal for a digital preservation collaboration between
Yale University Library and Elsevier Science". This project and the first report from
it has been described earlier in this paper.
See : http://www.diglib.org/preserve/yaleprop.htm
2) JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/)
Now well established. Characteristics :
 Perpetual access rights
 Cdroms can be provided as a last resort
 Has moved into a paper repository of scanned material
3) HIGHWIRE Press (http://highwire. tanford.edu/)
 Trying to make free back files for users, but no guarantees of permanent access
 No consistent approach to preservation, variations depending arrangements with
initial publisher
4) SPARC (http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=a0)
 Primary concern is providing new, low-cost solutions in scholarly science publishing.
 Advocates and involved with a variety of projects working to realise comprehensive
archiving for electronic publications.
 Particularly concerned with the intellectual property aspects of e-journal archiving.
5) OCLC ( http://www.oclc.org/oclc/eco/archive.htm)
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Sees itself as a leader in development of archiving and access preservation strategies
for e-journals through the expansion of its Electronic Collections Online programme.
Is committed to migrating archival material from outmoded formats to current
formats, but at its discretion and based on available technology and use information.
Intends to make the second release of ECO Z39.50 compatible in order to allow
libraries more easily to integrate access to OCLC's service with other electronic
resources.
United Kingdom
1. NESLI : http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation/archiv.html
2. JISC Digital Preservation Focus : http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation/
3. JISC Digital Preservation Links Page :
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation/preslinks.html
4. British Library National Preservation Office :
http://www.bl.uk/services/preservation/national.html
5. See also announcement email message to JISC-ECOLLECTIONS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK dated 19 November 2002 from Alison
McNab entitled : “Archiving E-Publications: Outline of JISC Consultancy”
International Collaboration
See the Memorandum of understanding between the UK Joint Information Systems
Committee and the Research Libraries Group, Inc at :
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/curriss/collab/mou/rlg.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Christine Maher, La Trobe University Library
David Groenewegen, Monash University Library
Gail James, Deakin University Learning Services
21 November 2002
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