On January 10, Louise Cole of the University of Leeds expressed her concern abut INFORMS' rolling archive policy. Her concerns are serious and deserve an explanation, as well as appropriate action on our part.
INFORMS current subscriptions, following an established publishers' standard, cover access for the current year plus four archive years (2007-2003). Our online terms and conditions have always stated that INFORMS provides online service with a service period from January 1st to December 31st of the subscription year. Annual renewals are required for continued access to the current plus four years. The rolling access meshes with access to embargoed content through aggregators such as EBSCO, ProQuest and JSTOR. INFORMS has never restricted participation to specific aggregators, to ensure the broadest possible access to our archival content prior to the period covered in current subscriptions.
The challenge has been to maintain those rules of access in place with our journal hosts; unfortunately, we were largely unsuccessful until we moved to HighWire.
INFORMS faced a new challenge this year. The recent transition to HighWire as the host for INFORMS, where these rules are now actually in effect, would have discontinued access to the 2002 journal year to all 2006 subscribers after our grace period of February 15th. 2007-only subscribers are limited to issues beginning in 2003. Given the change in hosts and the inconsistent enforcement of the rules before moving to HighWire, we are setting a special policy for this year. INFORMS will extend access to current plus five years for 2007 subscriptions (2007-2002). There will be no loss of access to 2002 issues for 2007 renewals and new subscribers.
As Ms. Cole points out, INFORMS will indeed be introducing an archival product in the near future that will cover all issues back to volume 1, issue 1 for all our journals. This archive will offer hundreds of issues never before available electronically directly through INFORMS to libraries. The metadata is being rekeyed and organized to allow more in-depth searches at the keyword and abstract level. INFORMS plans to introduce the archives in two parts. Archive I will include issues from 1985 to the end of the coverage of a current subscription. Every year, the oldest year in the current subscription will become part of Archive I. This product will have a one-time purchase price and a modest annual maintenance fee. Archive II will cover issues from 1984-1952, and will offer the balance of issues from the six oldest INFORMS journals. Archive II will have a modest one-time fee to cover the administrative costs. Both archives will be hosted at HighWire and tracked in the usage reports, and will be available for abstract/keyword searches. Pricing and release dates are not yet finalized. INFORMS will publish this information when it is available.
Once the archives are available for purchase, our subscription policy will revert to our current year plus four years access format. This policy was developed by our board, whose members were primarily academics, when INFORMS went online in 1999. The business rules are based on the observation that our most valuable research material is found in the current five years of journal articles. As noted above, the backfile articles are also available from several aggregators.
Feel free to contact us with your concerns. If you have strong opinions about INFORMS journals, we'll even welcome you to an INFORMS library panel. Direct your comments to
Patricia S. Shaffer
Director of Publications
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
(443) 757-3500 ext. 570
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