Are you wondering why you can’t access electronic copies of Scientific American on Nature.com web pages? Have you asked your colleagues at other UC campuses, only to find out they are having problems too? It’s not a problem with your computer or the network: it’s a challenge to licensing.
Nature Publishing Group recently took over publication of the journal Scientific American. The license terms for electronic access offered to the 10 UC campuses after this publisher change were prohibitive: according to the Challenges to Licensing web page maintained by the California Digital Library (CDL), the “cost of UC’s online site license [for Scientific American only] would be more than twice the fee currently charged for systemwide access. It is worth noting that this fee represents a ‘discounted’ offer: the list price quoted to the CDL is well over five times our current cost. The price of an institutional print subscription is also increasing more than seven-fold.”
Given these cost increases, the electronic subscription to Scientific American on Nature.com for all UC campuses was not renewed when it expired in May 2010. However, the UCLA Biomedical Library, the UCLA College Library, and the UCLA Science and Engineering Library have retained print subscriptions to this periodical. View a map of campus libraries to find these locations and get your hands on a print copy of Scientific American. Additionally, UCLA’s subscriptions to the Academic Search Complete and Business Source Complete databases includes access to selected articles from Scientific American from 1995 to the present.
If you’re interested in learning more about barriers to licensing or purhasing electronic materials, keep an eye on the CDL’s Challenges to Licensing page . It is updated when new information is available, and provides insight into the challenges of maintaining a world-class electronic collection for the libraries which are part of the University of California.
<submitted by Amy Chatfield>
