Charging for access to university‐wide networked database services in British academia

UK Higher Education has a well‐established network (JANET) accessible to its students and staff. Its existence made it possible for a trans‐university body (JISC) to sponsor the development of datacentres at various sites around the network. Through licensing agreements made with the owners of popular databases (typically marketed by commercial vendors), these databases are now accessible to the Higher Education community through JANET. Preserving the tradition of making print‐based media freely available in academia, there are no direct charges to endusers of electronic sources. There are, however, considerable charges (licensing fees) entailed for the community as a whole. JISC's policy has been that, while access is ‘free to the end‐user at the point of use’, an annual subscription is levied to each Higher Education site which provides access to these databases. In most cases this subscription is met from the budget of the institution's library and information services. The paper considers the impact of this centralised information provision on the growth of end‐user services and some limitations of the current charging policies.