Canada moves towards electronic-only journal collection

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The National Research Council Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI) is moving towards an electronic-only journal collection. The transition from print delivery to knowledge discovery of the electronic information will take place over the next two years.

NRC-CISTI's 'collect and connect strategy' involves collecting electronic-only titles and connecting clients to publisher sites and other sources of content.

This new strategy, says NRC-CISTI, is being implemented because demand for the council's print collection is dropping through wider access to the electronic versions from publishers, repositories and open-access source. Users have also shown a preference for immediate access to electronic content.

From January 2009, NRC-CISTI's print journal subscriptions from Elsevier, Springer and Taylor & Francis have been cancelled. This represents about one third of the current journal titles the organisation holds in the areas of science, technology and medicine. More print journal titles will be cancelled in the coming two years but it will continue to license the electronic versions of these titles.