Potential loss of knowledge. If at the end of that time, they cease paying the lease price, prior investment may become worthless as the information is taken away. License restrictions on use probably mean that libraries cannot let all and sundry make reasonable use of materials but must employ passwords and user IDs to restrict use to formal members of specified academic or scientific communities. Limitations on users' rights. In the world of license agreements the licensee generally begins with fewer rights to use information than in the world of print material, and then further limitations may be added.
Licenses are labor-intensive.
Negotiation requires time, and time is a major cost here. How librarians can work together with publishers to encourage a more enlightened form of agreement, with a fairer balance of rights and responsibilities, is an open question of the greatest importance. This has been the experience, in any case, for Indexing and Abstracting services, and American libraries have attempted to find the funding to absorb these increased costs for such valuable bibliographic tools. Now, full text is coming. For full text, many publishers also have the expectation that higher prices will be asked and should be paid.