Providing access to remote users is a priority for the OU Library. We made a
decision early last year to aggregate as many of our journals as possible on
Swetsnet Navigator hoping that all the journals that were hosted there would
be available off campus to our students with Athens authentication but this
has not been the case. We understand that this is not Swetsnet's fault but
that publishers are unwilling to allow off-campus via this route. This can
be very confusing for our students as full text content is marked as being
available but when they click to get the full text of the article which is
hosted on the publisher's server, access is denied. The inability to link
directly to a title for our remote users is also a major problem although I
know Swetsnet are working on this. We are currently having to maintain 2
links for all titles hosted on SwetsNet.
We are now moving down the proxy route. Providing off campus access to the
majority of our "core" journals i.e. those that come free with print, is a
priority. We have been contacting publishers to get their agreement to the
system we are developing. Most of the publishers we have contacted have been
very supportive of this move but justifiably require proof that the system
we are developing is secure. A very small minority of publishers have
required us to take out a multi-site license to cover remote access and this
requires an additional payment.
As Lauren states many US universities use this route. I suppose universities
in the UK have been hoping that Athens would provide the "solution" but this
appears not to be the case.
Judy Thomas
Subject Information Specialist for Science
Open University Library
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