The Big Ten Academic Alliance Shared Print Repository is in the second phase and ingestion of print volumes of journal titles is underway at the Oak Street Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  JSTOR titles are being assessed at the University of Iowa Libraries for potential withdrawal, considering Illinois has agreed to retain the print volumes and we have secure online access to the content.  Some journals won’t be withdrawn, as the print version is still used. We will rely on our subject specialist librarians to communicate about journals and other collections that are candidates for the SPR.

Lists of SPR candidate titles for phase 2 are available here:

List of JSTOR Journals


To: Faculty
From: John Culshaw and Carmelita Pickett
Date: June 12, 2015

RE: Update: CIC Shared Print Repository for Select Journal Titles

UI’s Libraries are critically short of space — for materials and study — and the same is true for most of our peers. To help, the CIC libraries created the Shared Print Repository (SPR) to store one complete set of rarely-used paper versions of select journals. Since my communication last year about the SPR, more than 95,000 journal volumes have been deposited there and the UI Libraries has withdrawn 14,927 Elsevier volumes.

We are now beginning a review of nearly 500 journal titles published by Springer that have been identified for the SPR. Next, the Libraries will assess journals published by Wiley for inclusion in the SPR. Once the Springer and Wiley titles are secured in SPR, the project will turn its attention to society publishers. These society publishers will include: ACS, AGU, AIP, IOP, ACM, RSC, IEEE, Nature, Science and Scientific American.

Our collection guidelines for withdrawing print journal titles will remain the same, we will withdraw print volumes for which we own back-run content in perpetuity. We will rely on the electronic copies with the security of having the bound volumes at SPR. Some journals won’t be withdrawn, as the print version is still used. We will rely on our subject specialist librarians to communicate with you about journals and other collections that are candidates for the SPR.

Additional information, including lists of SPR candidate titles, is available here:

List of Print Elsevier Journals

List of Print Springer Journals

List of Print Wiley Journals

List of Print University and Society Press Journals

List of Print Sage Journals

We plan to start withdrawing selected Springer volumes in July 2015.