As you may be aware, one of the primary methods by which CSU acquires ebooks from university presses is with a demand-driven acquisition (DDA) program with JSTOR. This DDA program functions by allowing us to load into our our catalogue the records for the full frontlists of selected publishers, as new books are released, without having to pay to purchase them all up front. The books are catalogued and available, and are only purchased once one of our users decides to make use of them beyond a certain threshold.
This has worked well for many years, however recently several university presses have started implementing embargoes on their frontlist content being included in DDA programs:
What this means is that once these embargoes were put in place, any titles that were in our catalogue thanks to the DDA program, but that we didn’t purchase and that fell within the embargo period, were removed from the catalogue and will no longer be available to our users. Going forward, frontlist content from these publishers will only be added to our DDA pool and made available to users after the embargo period (e.g. if a Princeton University Press title is published on January 1, 2024, it will be added to our DDA pool on January 1, 2026).
These university publications are still available for purchase during the embargo period, just not via DDA. If you receive questions about 2022 or 2023 publications from these presses that were previously in the catalogue but aren’t anymore, they were likely removed from our DDA pool. You can request that patrons submit a Recommend a Purchase form for titles they would like us to purchase, or you can submit a Monograph Order request form on their behalf.
While we don’t have the funds to purchase the full frontlists for all of the publishers implementing these embargoes, we did start purchasing the Columbia University Press frontlist in 2023, and we recently added the following publishers to our ProQuest approval plans, meaning that we will purchase many of their books as they are released:
Starting with 2023 publications:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Harvard University Press
- Princeton University Press
Starting with 2024 publications:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Boydell & Brewer
- Fordham Press
- University of California Press
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- University of Texas Press
- Yale University Press
CSU will continue to work to provide the best possible access to university press monographs, and there may be more changes to come. If you have any concerns or questions about this, please feel free to email us at: csu@ualberta.ca.