Perpetual rights and entitlement tracking in Alma DRAFT

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Recommendation

Impact

Reasoning

CDL Shared Licensing negotiates a significant portion of the journal collection for all UC campuses. These licenses determine to what extent these resources have assurance for long-term preservation, post-cancellation access, and mechanisms for access. Perpetual access (or alternatively, archival) status information supports more complex projects that involve placing serials in digital storage facilities, repurposing stacks to free up physical space for alternative uses, and resulting metadata operationalizes data-driven decision-making, . Data also informs gauging long-term access to the digital journals, which is mission critical for libraries, to ensure digital scholarly content in all formats remains available to future users. For instance, if a journal ceases to be published, the archival status guides users to the archiving agency providing long-term access. Without operationalizing this data, decisions are made in the dark, jeopardizing the local community users uninterrupted access to content, regardless of whether a subscription continues, or a business or technology fails.

Background

Perpetual access, is a mutual obligation libraries and publishers have to ensure long-term preservation of the scholarly. Agreements between the parties are good places to document these mutual obligations. These might be subscription agreements, open access publishing agreements, or agreements that blend the two. Recent research indicates that in many existing agreements, terms were vague, unclear regarding the precise content and time depth preserved, unnecessarily restrictive in terms of access and/or use, conflated post-cancellation access and long-term digital preservation and access, and was sometimes administratively burdensome to implement. It was also difficult to verify compliance with the agreements, and that the content was actually preserved properly. In 2023, LibLicense Model license recommended improved language and guidance for working this into new agreements.

License categories for post-cancellation access (PCA)
University of Minnesota-Minneapolis executed a retrospective analysis of all licenses and found most agreements could be grouped into the following categories for post-cancellation access (PCA):

• third-party preservation entities (e.g., Portico)

• delivered (e.g., jump drive)

• vendor hosted and some with fees

• rolling PCA allowed access to the most recent five years of content, so with every year of subscription more and more content would become inaccessible.
  
  (Sunshine Carter, “The perpetual access rights ‘problem’,” ELUNA Annual Meeting, Spokane, WA, May 3, 2018, https://documents.el-una.org/id/eprint/1706/ (accessed 5 April 2023)

Alma functionality
Facilitates licenses associated with corresponding portfolios. Given local campuses may also license the same journal as CDL, with different coverage dates, this creates a more complex record keeping process. UCSC has developed a workflow distinguishing local access versus CDL coverage.

Local UC Campus Practices
Campus Tracking data points for Perpetual Access - survey of local activity. (March 2024).

Options Considered [remove if not needed]

Dependencies

• https://uc-sils.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CDLNZPT

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ow1tmaNlebYVpFBhrLbPuMnz0qkEVO5PGbGCp78KSY0/edit?usp=sharing

Questions to consider

Action Log