We're working in collaboration with publishers to make digital archival collections of primary source materials more affordable, so researchers, teachers and learners can enjoy access to a wider range of resources and libraries can achieve further efficiencies.
What we’re doing
Our pilot is based on a community-centred approach to lowering the cost of digital archival collections and the simple market principle: the more products purchased, the lower the price.
Phase two, November 2017 - July 2018
Adam Matthew Digital, Brill, EBSCO and ProQuest are each making available approximately 20 archival collections, at discounted prices. At the end of the pilot period (November 2017 – July 2018), the price for each collection will be calculated according to an institution’s Jisc Collections band1 and how many products had been cumulatively purchased by institutions' per publisher.
We'll continuously update the discount threshold reached from each publisher via our content and digitisation blog. This will provide a clear indicator of the level of discount available to institutions across the products offered by the publishers.
Browse the available collections
Visit the catalogue pages via the Jisc Collections website to review the products on offer for this second pilot:
All orders must be placed through the Jisc Collections website to confirm the order with the final cumulative discount determined at the end of financial year, July 2018.
All prices are for one-off purchases and include platform/hosting fees and are covered by a Jisc model license.
Phase one, March - July 2017
How this will help you
- A more efficient, coordinated and transparent approach to the acquisition of digital archival collections
- Institutions collectively help each other to drive down the cost of digital archival collections, by leveraging the power of group purchasing
- Institutions can easily compare products on offer
- All titles are a one-off purchase with no recurrent platform/hosting fee
- A simplified and uniform approach to procuring and licensing collections from multiple publishers
Why this matters
Digital collections of primary source material such as texts, images and audiovisual content can make a positive impact on innovative research practice and skills development, as a recent post on the LSE Impact blog described.
Our joint study with ProQuest on the impacts of digital collections also concluded that these collections are now part of the scholarly communication lifecycle, echoing previous studies (see toolkit for the impact of scholarly digital resources).
Researchers and librarians face a common concern: how can we ensure sustainable access to special collections to deliver better research and innovative teaching?
Libraries have said2 that digital archival collections of primary source material are an important complement to traditional resources such as journals and books, but budgets are stretched and they find it difficult to purchase these often expensive content resources.
Contact us
For more information on either of our pilots, please contact Karen Colbron (karen.colbron@jisc.ac.uk).
Footnotes
- 1 The basis for subscription fees for most of the online resources in the Jisc Collections catalogue: https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Support/Jisc-Banding
- 2 Read more in our news item, purchasing power - we unveil initiatives to make digital collections affordable - https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/purchasing-power-we-unveil-initiatives-to-ma...
