0.8 Online hosting issues and options  (Page 6/11)

Retrospective digitization and backfile availability

Many publishers provide online access to retrospective volumes as part of their online journal service. A significant number of small nonprofit publishers offer five or more years of back volume coverage. According to one survey, over 45% of small nonprofit publishers provide current subscribers with access to their online archive for no additional fee, and over 35% make their archives freely available to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Cox and Cox (2008), 57.

Besides providing retrospective coverage as part of a current online journal, some societies also make digital back volumes available through JSTOR, a nonprofit digital archive of journal content in the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. JSTOR currently comprises almost 2 million articles in 47 disciplines. See www.jstor.org . To minimize cancellations of current institutional library subscriptions, access to most of the journals available through JSTOR is subject to a rolling embargo of between three and five years. Societies participating in JSTOR can establish an embargo period of from zero to 15 years. Digital archives also exist in specific fields, such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), which provides an archiving option for journals in bioscience. See (External Link) .

A society has several options for making its retrospective volumes available online. If the society does not participate in JSTOR, BHL, or a similar archive, it can pay to have its backfile digitized at the same time it moves its current volume online. Many providers of online publishing platforms will manage this process on the society’s behalf.

As noted above, almost two-thirds of society publishers include these backfile volumes as a component of their online service, at no additional charge. However, some societies that incur the expense of digitizing extensive back volumes of a journal charge a separate fee for access to the retrospective volumes online. Alternatively, some academic research libraries have demonstrated a willingness to pay for the cost of backfile digitization, as long as the back volumes are made freely available.

The cost of the backfile digitization will depend on several issues, including the number of volumes, the digital format(s) into which the content is converted (e.g., PDF, SGML/HTML, XML/XHTML, etc.), and the extent of metadata tagging and reference linking applied.

A society that participates in JSTOR will still need to provide online access to the recent back volumes that fall outside the journal’s rolling embargo. The society can cover this back volume gap in several ways:

1. Amend its agreement with JSTOR to shorten or eliminate the access embargo.
2. Retire the gap incrementally over several years—for example, assuming a three-year JSTOR embargo, over the first three years after launch, the online service will gradually fill in the missing years.
3. Digitize the gap years immediately and integrate the content—essentially the same approach as if the journal did not participate in JSTOR.