SafeNet is a Jisc project to develop the foundations of national archive infrastructure to host a UK collection of archived e-journals and clarify continuing access rights through use of an entitlement registry that will record subscription history. The intention is to simplify the route to articles when a current subscription is no longer in place and access via the publisher’s platform is either unavailable or unaffordable.
In January 2015, Jisc Collections carried out a survey of its membership in order to understand the post-cancellation access needs of the UK HE community.  We are now making available the results of that survey.  37 people representing 35 institutions – approximately 25% of UK higher education institutions – completed an online questionnaire which was sent out on three mailing lists aimed at librarians. The detailed free text responses given to many of the questions will take longer to analyse, so a preliminary report is designed to give early indicative feedback to the community.
The responses highlight the concern that access to journal content could be lost when subscriptions are cancelled, with 89% of respondents saying that they were ‘quite concerned’ or ‘very concerned’:
When asked ‘How useful would a UK managed post-cancellation access solution, consisting of an archive of journal content and a registry of entitlement information, be to your library?’ 36 (97%) or respondents replied ‘quite useful’ or ‘very useful’. This gives Jisc a clear mandate to continue pursuing the project and discussing terms of participation with publishers.
Next steps
The project aims to deliver a working service by July 2016. We will continue to consult with the library community as the project develops – EDINA have conducted follow up interviews with a number of UK institutions which will form the basis of use cases, and these will feature in a future blog post. Feel free to contact the project team if you have any further questions.