Hi Diane,
This has been a problem with us also in the past year or so. And I agree it is primarily Highwire-accessed journals that provided so-called “free access”.
Then, when the publisher decides to charge for Archival or Legacy Backfiles, some of those years we used to get for free become part of the backfile and we no
longer have access.
This was really an issue for us, because we just had a huge space reduction and had to weed most of our bound print collection. I had extensively researched
access start dates, reliability of access, whether it was from consortiums or subscriptions, etc…and I still got burned by a few titles that suddenly removed years from our access that fell into that newly created “archive period”.
Basically, I have learned that any access dates can be changed at any time…unless you have made the one-time purchase of an archive, with a specific start and
end date.
Pam
Pamela L. O'Brien
Library Assistant
St. Jude Children's
Biomedical Library
901-595-3389