Academic Electronic Journals: Past, Present, and Future - Advances in Computers - page 165

F IG . 6. Increase in the usage of JSTOR from 1997 to 2005.
4. Reduced Real Estate.
5. Increased access by students and teaching faculty.
Fixed subscription cost . The cost of the collection is the same no matter how often
the electronic collection is accessed. However, some collections limit the number of
simultaneous users; in that case, large libraries buy more 'seats' than small libraries.
The providers of collections (who act as intermediaries) are able to negotiate low
access fees with publishers of individual journals by leveraging economies of scale.
The result is that scholars can gain any-time-any-place access to a large number of
journals from their personal computers while libraries are able to contain their costs.
For example, a university that subscribes to the ACM Digital Library provides access
to a total of six journals, 23 transactions, ten magazines, publications by 42 Special
Interest Groups (SIGs) and 16 affiliated organizations newsletters and conference
proceedings ( http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm ) .
New and expanding disciplines . Libraries with budget shortfalls drop subscriptions
when publishers raise their prices (Section 3.4.5 ). Shrinking budgets makes it diffi-
cult to add publications that serve emerging areas of research. Electronic collection
providers can create a portfolio of new titles together with more established titles for
marginally higher fees. In such cases, electronic collections increase accessibility to
new areas of research.
Interlibrary loans . Collections reduce the need for interlibrary loans. When li-
braries carry only a certain number of paper journals, scholars often request copies
of articles via interlibrary loan (ILL) services. Because it usually takes a week or
two to obtain a paper copy of an article through interlibrary loan, this process delays