National licenses – More content for everybody

Since recently, Lib4RI users have had access to a substantial number of additional journal articles from the publishing houses Cambridge University Press (CUP), de Gruyter and Oxford University Press (OUP). This comprehensive content has been acquired as national licenses by the Consortium of the Swiss Academic Libraries within the framework of the SUK P-2 program: «Scientific information: accessing, processing and saving». Through these national licenses, Lib4RI users can access a much larger journal portfolio from the three publishers and the corresponding archives. The national licenses include more than 2 million journal articles and encompass the years 1770-2015 (CUP), 1826-2015 (de Gruyter) and 1895- 2015 (OUP). The recent volumes of the most significant journals were already available for Lib4RI users before the acquisition of the national licenses.

The amount of available content within the national licenses will grow even more in
future. For all three publishers, recent content will be added after an embargo period
of five (CUP), two (de Gruyter) and three (OUP) years, respectively. The authorised
users of this project are defined to be all institutions of higher education and research
in Switzerland which are part of the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries, as well
as cantonal libraries. Access for non-institutional («private») users with permanent
residence in Switzerland was successfully negotiated, as well, and is expected to be
implemented by autumn 2016.

Besides access to the publisher’s archive contents, extended green open-access rights were also negotiated as part of the national licenses. As a result, the publisher versions of articles can be archived in institutional repositories – usually, archiving is only possible for author versions. For CUP and OUP the embargo periods are five and three years, respectively, whereas there is no embargo period for de Gruyter.

Besides these three national licenses, the Cochrane Library has been available since
the beginning of 2016 as a national license, as well. The Cochrane Library is a collection of systematic reviews from medicine that summarises and interprets the results of the latest research. However, in this case, financing is provided by other sources, namely the SAMW, the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), university libraries and hospitals.

Further information on title lists, private access and research areas of the licensed
journals is available on the website: www.nationallicences.ch. Please do not hesitate
to contact us if you have further questions on the national license products or open
access.