Pricing and licensing of electronic journals: Key issues from a historical perspective

Electronic journals, born in the early 1990s, have brought a variety of pricing and licensing issues that had not existed in the age of print journals. Among the issues is the diversity of pricing policies; although several pricing structures were established as relatively common in the late 1990s as a result of various attempts by publishers, there still have been new developments. Also reviewed here, with an emphasis on their historical development, are other important issues peculiar to electronic journal licensing, including multi-site licensing, archival access after cancellation, backfile access, package subscription, and subscription via library consortia.