152.2 RESPONSES TO MICHAEL SLADE IN NO. 151, Peter Stangl and Mignon Adams
152.3 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND CONTROLLING COSTS, Albert Henderson
152.4 NUCLEIC ACIDS RESEARCH - NOW FULLY ONLINE, Richard Gedye
152.5 SUBSCRIPTION PRICING FOR 1996, Dawson Electronic Library News
Michele Crump, University of Florida,
MCRUMP@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu.
American Library Association
1996 Mid-Winter Meeting
San Antonio, TX
ALCTS
Automated Acquisitions/In-Process Control Systems
Discussion Group presents:
LIVING WITH ELECTRONIC DATA INTERCHANGE:
Implementation and Practical Applications for EDI from the
Perspective of the ILS Vendor, the Librarian, and the Book
Vendor
Monday, January 22, 1996
9:30 - 11:00 a.m.
Sheraton Gunter
Bluebonnet Room
DISCUSSION LEADERS:
Karen Cargille
Head, Acquisitions Department
University of California, San Diego
Sandy Westall
Innovative Interfaces, Inc.
Emeryville, CA
Rick Lugg
Vice President, Library Systems Services Yankee Book Peddler
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ACRL Journal Costs In Academic Libraries Discussion Group
presents:
"Partnership: Reality or Myth? A Frank Discussion
about Vendor, Publisher, and Library Relationships"
Saturday, January 20, 1996
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Holiday Inn Riverwalk North, "Taos" Room
Speakers:
Jane Maddox
Director of Library Services for North America
Otto Harrassowitz
John Long
Sales Manager, North America
Institute of Physics Publishing
Daniel Jones
Assistant Director for Collection Development
Briscoe Library
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
152.2 RESPONSES TO MICHAEL SLADE IN NO. 151
Peter Stangl, Stanford University, peter@krypton.stanford.edu and Mignon Adams, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, ADAMS@SHRSYS.HSLC.ORG.
From Peter Stangl:
In response Michael Slade's piece I would like to offer the following brief comment:
CD-ROM journal products, regardless of their quality, are not the electronic solution to the problems or demise of the print journal. They may be an acceptable vehicle for physical distribution in some cases (cheaper to produce and ship than paper), but they are not an adequate medium on which to base electronic distribution (too slow for multiple simultaneous access).
Further, most publishers specifically prohibit networking the CD-ROM, or copying its contents to a magnetic medium, which we would need to do in order to make remote access to them a practical alternative.
Thus CD-ROM products become a spiffy component in perpetuating the old model of the 4-wall library -- in order to use them, the user still has to come to where it is housed (or go there to borrow it). The library need not grow as fast perhaps as with print volumes, but the potential of electronic access remains untapped.
What (at least some) librarians are interested in is the replacement of the traditional physical facility with a virtual library that exists as an icon on your screen, and which assembles information you require from a rich variety of sources in a way that readily integrates into your work environment. For journals this means on-line access to full text and images, linked updates, critiques, letters, or even underlying research data. CD-ROM is not adequate to support this model.
(Do not take this to mean that the utility of the traditional library facility is finished herewith. It will, and should, survive for quite some time to come. But as its replacement is certain, even if gradual, we would like to see more movement in the publishing world -- at a faster pace than to date -- toward experimentation in production and marketing (subscription, site licensing, transaction based charging, etc.) of electronic formats utilizing the full potential of integration into an electronic work environment.)
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From Mignon Adams:
I am among those librarians who are puzzled as to why we are receiving CD-ROM copies of journals, and I read with interest the response of a non-librarian, who essentially said we needed to get with it.
It seems to me that our users use journals in one of two ways: they browse the latest (or last couple of) issues to keep up with what's happening in their field. Or they track down citations in older journals which they found from bibliographies or from a computer search. CD-ROMs do not seem to me to serve either purpose very well. Most of us do not at the present like to do extensive reading via a computer screen, so "browsing" on a CD-ROM doesn't seem attractive. If someone is working from a list of citations, which are typically from a number of different journals, gathering a number of different CD-ROMs, and loading them each individually, seems to me to be as much fun as loading microfilm reels (and we all know how much our users like that!). It is true that CD-ROMs take much less space than bound journals, but most of us have real concerns about their longevity as archival copies.
Maybe librarians are wrong about our view, and maybe our users will take to using CD-ROMs instead of print journals with alacrity. However, I have offered the CDs we've received to faculty members whose research interests lie in the contents covered, and have had no takers.
On the other hand, I am just beginning to use several electronic publications on the Web, and I see a real advantage to these. With my subscription to the _Chronicle of Higher Education_, for example, I receive a daily notice of important stories; when I enter the website which contains the entire issue, it is easier for me to skim through the publication and pick out those articles I'm most interested in; there are links to earlier related articles; and finally, the fulltext of the last five years are searchable. And I don't have to load a CD-ROM. I'm even considering subscribing to the _Philadelphia Inquirer_ online, which promises to have similar features.
To my way of thinking, and in my experience as a user, journals on CD-ROMs are not the wave of the future.
152.3 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND CONTROLLING COSTS: A RESPONSE TO FRY AND EDINGTON
Albert Henderson, Editor, Publishing Research Quarterly_, 70244.1532@compuserve.com.
The last few years has produced a great deal of speculation about the possibility of reducing expenses with new technology. Publishers and their vendors who have sufficient resources have embarked on experiments to see what actually works. The experiments use up scarce resources, so thoughtful feedback is valuable. Many of the results so far -- the findings of the APS task force a few years ago or the ELVYN Project, for instance -- have indicated that users are not particularly interested in learning new ways unless they really are better or in having many costs of production and distribution shifted in their direction. I would encourage everyone to make specific comments and recommendations direct to publishers that are distributing trial CD-ROMs and other experimental media. Some of the media novelties may be good for industrial applications but not for academic -- or vice versa.
Dr. Fry's efforts to develop cost-sensitive vendors are representative of a long history of publishers fighting inflation by adopting microforms, cold type, offset printing, desktop publishing, electronic communications between editors, and other technological innovations. Like librarians, publishers are caught in a vise. On one side of the coin, universities have cut their library budgets in half since 1969 leading to perennial cancellation projects (as documented recently by MIT: http://macfadden.mit.edu:9500/sercan/top.html) which force publishers' prices upward. Libraries are faced with special demands on resources that include preservation, new technology, and the labor-intensive tasks of a skyrocketing demand for interlibrary loans. On the other side, our science policy has generated the "page inflation" with a 2.5 times (current dollar) increase in academic research expenditure and a written output to match. Database statistics suggest that foreign research interests, which contribute 60% of the world literature, have done likewise. The foreign contribution has been aggravated by the periodic devaluation of the U.S. dollar which, in 1969, was worth about 4 DeutschMarks (now about 1.44). There is no provision, by science policy makers, to deal with the "information asset" that is being choked by what Michael Gorman has called "the treason of the learned:" the cannibalization of the library funds for other programs. An audit of 14 universities caught them misapplying research overheads when there was "no money" to cope with foreign currency adjustments; Ask yourself who decided to refund millions to the Treasury rather than restore canceled subscriptions.
Prior to WWII, the U.S. imported technology with considerable vigor. Since then, library growth slowed. Foreign research has been increasingly ignored in the U.S. while foreign researchers import our technology and capture economic benefits demonstrated by balance of payments and currency adjustments. Studies using the AMIGOS and OCLC databases have indicated that collection of foreign materials has been dropping substantially. The technology solution proposed by AAU/ARL of acquiring one copy of all foreign works, digitizing and distributing them will probably fail inasmuch as it flies in the face of the Berne Convention.
152.4 NUCLEIC ACIDS RESEARCH - NOW FULLY ONLINE
Richard Gedye, Oxford University Press, gedyer@oup.co.uk.
[Press Release]
_Nucleic Acids Research_ is delighted to announce the official launch of its online edition, NAR Online.
All 1996 subscribers to NAR can access NAR Online at no additional charge, for the whole of 1996. If this includes you, here are the advantages that online access to NAR will bring you:
* An e-mail current awareness service, giving you advance notice of papers to be published.
* Articles available online in advance of hard copy.
* Speedy delivery of full text articles, either as postscript files, PDF files, or as HTML files via the World Wide Web.
* Access to a fully searchable three year back file of papers, each one obtainable either via FTP or the World Wide Web.
* Hot links from references directly to their Medline Abstracts
* Hot links from articles to genetic sequencing databases
* Annual database issue with live links. The first issue of NAR in 1996 is the annual database issue, always the most cited issue of the year. The online version of this issue contains links to all of the databases described which can be accessed via the Web.
NAR Online is available at the following URL:-
All visitors to this URL can browse the tables of contents and abstracts freely, but you will need to be a subscriber to _Nucleic Acids Research_ in order to access the full text of articles online.
For both individual and institutional subscribers, single user access to NAR Online is included in the basic print subscription rate to NAR. Multi-user access within the library or throughout the campus site will require the purchase of a site licence....
152.5 SUBSCRIPTION PRICING FOR 1996
From Dawson Electronic Library News, http://www.dawson.co.uk.
This year's survey shows price increases have been as varied as in other years. While most European and many US publishers have kept their increases to a reasonable level the decline in the value of sterling has meant that British libraries face a hefty increase once again.
Heading the list for increases for the second year running, is MCB with 24%. However they say they are adding value to some of their journals by including disks and CD-ROM's, so the increase includes a VAT element. Carfax are demanding the second highest rise with almost 19%. At the other end of the scale is HMSO with increases of less than 5%.
# Sterling % increase $ Dollar Prices % increase Academic Press (London) 12.6 Acad Press (San Diego) 10.3 Basil Blackwell 10.6 American Inst of Physics 10.4 Blackwell Scientific 11.1 American Soc of Chemistry15.4 Cambridge University Press 9.4 Elsevier (New York) 5.0 Carfax 18.9 Plenum 8.0 Elsevier (Oxford) 11.3 F T Business Information 8.9 European Prices % increase HMSO 5.0 Institute of Physics 11.1 Elsevier (Amsterdam) 10.1 John Wiley 15.8 Elsevier (Lausanne) 5.8 MCB 24.0 Kluwer 8.0 Oxford University Press 8.7 Springer-Verlag 7.9 Royal Society of Chemistry 17.5 Sweet & Maxwell 14.0 Taylor & Francis 13.0
Calculated by Dawson
Statements of fact and opinion appearing in the _Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues_ are made on the responsibility of the authors alone, and do not imply the endorsement of the editor, the editorial board, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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