However, this tactic does have one danger. One aspect of consortia purchasing in the networked environment, is to link everyone's financial fate much closer together. Within UT System, the financial fate of the UT-Austin libraries is much more crucial than it has been in the past. If those societies are willing to provide the library with electronic access for free, then the library would gladly support both formats. Unfortunately, libraries frequently pay an institutional rate for journals that is many times higher than an individual subscriber, and publishers are often unwilling to provide libraries with low cost e-journals out of fear that individual subscribers on campus will drop their subscriptions.
Societies differ widely in their general approach to libraries.
If you are concerned about the health of academic libraries, it would be useful for you to inquire about your society's policies toward academic libraries and the prices they charge for access to their e-journals and databases. Libraries have long asked faculty to not accept the editorships of these high cost journals or to otherwise support them, since the cost of these journals forces widespread journal cancellations as well as cut backs in book purchasing in higher education institutions throughout the world. The library web has seldom experienced any difficulties, and then only for seconds until a back-up server took over. It is possible however, for there to be infrastructure breakdowns somewhere between your computer and a specific e-journal server for short periods of time. Almost every time this has happened over the past five years, it has involved scheduled downtime for maintenance between 2am and 4 am on a Sunday or a similar low use time period.