Keeping Online Articles Available
A group of libraries and publishers are cooperating on a pilot project to ensure access to online journals. Libraries at five universities, as well as the New York Public Library, will work with nine publishers on an archive that will consist of copies of journal articles from participating publishers stored on 10 servers at the universities.
Those archived copies will be unavailable to the public, but the system will monitor the Web sites of the journals that published those articles. When the system detects that the publisher’s online version of an article is unavailable for an extended period of time, the system’s governing board will decide whether to make the archived copy available. The goal is to ensure long-term access to journal articles, even when publishers go out of business or computer systems suffer severe outages or losses of data. The effort is important because libraries and publishers are frequently at odds over how and when to provide online access to copyrighted material. Those involved hope the effort will help the groups work together toward a common goal.
Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 January 2006 (available to UI affiliates and subscribers only) http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/01/2006012502t.htm
