An update on Wiley Online Library Access

You may have noticed a recent change to a subset of the Wiley content you encounter in your research. In some cases, you might see a message about Article Select Tokens when you go to read the full text. On the Wiley website, you will see this message with articles that are available via “Token Access.” 

In very select circumstances, you may see the message when accessing Wiley content through LibrarySearch, but for the most part, we do not anticipate that you will encounter it this way.

This is a temporary measure that we don’t expect to be in place for longer than a couple of months at the most. If you are a Middlebury student, faculty member, or staff member and need a Wiley article, please feel free to go ahead and click Use Token.

This is what the message looks like:

If you’d like a bit more background information on this situation, we invite you to keep reading!

For a handful of publishers, we provide access via tokens, which are essentially a form of pay-per-view for articles and other content. This allows us to provide access to content that we don’t outright subscribe to or own. This approach was implemented years ago in an attempt to curb costs while still providing access. You can use a token to access an article in a journal that we don’t subscribe to, and get full access to that article.

Usually, this happens without you knowing. The token balance is simply adjusted automatically behind the scenes with each view or download. As the token balance approaches zero, we purchase more tokens, as our budget allows, to continue providing access. We have historically gotten tokens from several publishers, but currently, we only purchase them from Wiley and Springer.

Last year, token usage skyrocketed—particularly from Wiley—making it so that we were spending many times the usual amount on token replenishments in order to keep up with demand. Since this trend began, we have been working diligently to understand the causes of the sudden, dramatic uptick and explore possible subscription or purchase options.

Because we would otherwise be at risk of having our entire budget for the year quickly spent on Wiley tokens, which would limit our ability to renew our other subscriptions and purchase new materials, we have opted to implement this more mediated model that Wiley offers. The verbiage of the message is Wiley’s and cannot be altered (we asked!).

As we mentioned above, please do not hesitate to click Use Token if you are a Middlebury student, faculty member, or staff member. This is not meant to be a permanent solution, and we plan to have a resolution within the next couple of months.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Julie Adamo, Director of Collection Strategies and Acquisitions (jadamo@middlebury.edu) and Gretchen Kenet, Electronic and Continuing Resources Librarian (gkenet@middlebury.edu).

Thank you for your patience.