I agree with Beverly Bruce that electronic dissemination is an issue which cannot be ignored. My own field of astronomy now has about 50 percent of the current peer reviewed journals available in electronic form of some kind or another. Within six months, that fraction will rise above 75 percent. While astronomy is ahead of most fields it is clear that electronic dissemination is upon us.
The American Astronomical Society has adopted the philosophy of including institutional electronic access as part of the subscription price of the paper edition. We have tried to make our site license simple and have avoided incorporating onerous administrative tasks in the license. Details can be found on the Web pages of the _Astrophysical Journal_ (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/). It should be noted that an electronic-only subscription is available at reduced cost.
But, I question a couple of assumptions implicit in the article. First of all, neither I nor any of the astronomy librarians I know, believe that CD-ROM is a satisfactory archival medium. Not only is its inherent longevity untested as yet, it is sure to be superseded by new technology before the millennium is over.
But, more important is the definition of what constitutes an electronic journal. The MCB electronic journals seem (as far as I can tell) to be little more than electronic delivery of paper journals, at least at this time. For such offerings, a CD-ROM can suffice, and the additional cost of electronic production is minimal.
But it will not be long before every electronic journal, in order to compete successfully, will have to include a lot more features such as links to references, citation lists to the article, links to auxiliary bibliographic data and links to supplementary figures, plates and other information sources, such as the MCB online forums. It won't be long before journals even contain multimedia clips.
We will all have to face the increased costs which adding features will entail. It behooves the scholarly publishers to think very hard about adding features which are costly in money, network transmission time and equipment required to read the electronic journal. In deciding whether to add a new feature, the additional information should be balanced against the increased costs. But, even with care, the costs of producing electronic journals will go up.
An even more difficult problem will be how to archive a full-featured electronic journal; one which is much more than the mere collection of articles. To be useful, the electronic journal archive should also include all the links and all the supplementary material. An effective electronic journal is a heavily interlinked collection which cannot be archived either on a CD-ROM or on paper.
Readers may wish to sample the electronic _Astrophysical Journal_ (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/) and follow the links to references, which lead to the bibliographic database, which can lead to the astronomical data centers which, in turn, will lead back to the journals to get a feel for the archiving problem we will all soon face. Our interim solution is to preserve our own journals for the indefinite future. We have established a fund for to pay for actively managing the electronic archive of our own journals. We encourage the other publishers of electronic journals in astronomy to do likewise. As libraries tackle the archiving problem, we hope to collaborate in the preservation and access of the entire electronic information collection.
170.2 SUBSCRIPTION PRICES FOR JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY
Bob Simoni, Journal of Biological Chemistry,
rdsimoni@leland.stanford.edu.
I've followed the discussion of pricing and service for online journals with great interest and have read some important perspectives on this complex issue in the Newsletter.
I'm an Associate Editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, ASBMB) and have been involved, along with Stanford's HighWire Press, in publishing the JBC online. We feel that the technical side of our effort has been enormously successful, well received and now widely imitated. We also feel that the added value of the online version is enormous and offers our subscribers the ability to manage the increasing volume of research information more effectively. Authors, readers and institutions are well served by this mode of publication.
The Journal is published on a non-profit basis by the ASBMB. Our prices for both the print and online versions are governed by our non- profit status. We offered the online JBC free to everyone from April, '95 to June, '96. During this period we improved the technical level and features of the online Journal and eventually felt that it was of sufficient quality that we began to charge a subscription fee.
The cost of producing the JBC is covered primarily from institutional, non-member subscriptions and page charges to authors. Subscriptions sold to Society members are sold at cost and do not influence the balance sheet. During the extended free access period, we had begun to receive requests for cancellation of print subscriptions as some institutions began to shed the print version in favor of free online service. While this behaviour was not widespread, it obviously presented a substantial risk to our revenue stream and thus the initiation of a subscription charge for the online version.
For 1996 we set a fee of $200 for whatever fraction of 1996 remained for each institutional subscriber. Several contributors to the Newsletter have noted that the price of the online version went from $200 for '96 to $1100 for '97 and feel that the increase is large and unwarranted. I guess this depends on your perspective. On average, each institutional subscriber for '96 has paid access for about 2-3 months, clearly a much higher yearly cost than $200. It was our feeling from the outset that given the mid-year charge and the uncertain subscription time for the remainder of '96 we would charge a very low fee. I would argue, therefore, that the perception of a large increase for '97 is simply because the fee for '96 was very low. Before you conclude that this is entirely self-serving, bear with me.
There has also been discussion about the wisdom of pricing the print and online versions separately and not providing some coupled pricing scheme. This point is usually accompanied by concerns about the high cost of the online version. A great deal of thought and discussion went into the decision to price the print and online versions separately. We publish 52 issues of JBC each year and each issue is rapidly approaching the 4 lb. limit for second class mail. As a result, we have a serious problem with print volume. We considered daily home delivery of the Journal but instead feel that is likely that we will abandon the current version of the print journal and we want to encourage the transition to the online version. We want institutions to make a choice. Importantly, we are not committed to maintaining the print Journal, in fact we are committed to its eventual demise, and we want to offer clear choices to our institutional subscribers. As those choices are made we can better judge our future plans. Furthermore, we do not consider the online version to be a supplement to the print version and feel that charging a 10-20% "supplement fee" to the print subscription is inconsistent with our goal to move from print to online.
We understand the limitations of serial subscription budgets for institutions, particularly universities. ASBMB chose to collaborate with the Stanford Library system, HighWire Press, on this venture to be sure that we kept the library perspective in clear view. John Sack, Vicky Reich, Mike Keller and their colleagues have been enormously helpful, and outspoken, as we considered the many alternative pricing possibilities. We consider our '97 pricing plan to be an experiment and if it becomes clear that we are not serving our authors, readers or publication objectives, we will change our policy for '98 to better serve our subscribers and maintain the high quality of the Journal.
The most disheartening aspect of much of the discussion about our subscription pricing, however, is that value is seldom discussed. For $2500/yr an institution can subscribe to a print copy and the online version of JBC. For $2500/yr you receive 34,000 pages, almost 200 lbs., of the most highly cited biochemistry research. This calculates to about 8 cents/page. At this price, $2500 for both the print and online versions, the JBC is still far less costly than virtually any other life science journal, including the other Society journals and, I would argue, an enormous value. (One of our many pricing proposals was to charge all institutions $2500/yr for '97 and provide both print and online. We've always considered this to be the "hardball" proposal and we opted to offer a choice.) For a value comparison, and without trying to cast stones, consider the Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics published by a for-profit publisher, Academic Press. For '96 ABB costs about 33 cents/page for the print version alone, more than four times the combined cost of print and online JBC. Another example is the journal Biochemistry published by the American Chemical Society at a cost of 11 cents/page for print only for '96. Where is the value? Why has value not been a part of the ongoing discussion?
As we continue our experiment, we have several features planned which will add still greater value to our product. We will offer an archive version for '97. We will have mirror sites in the UK and Europe. And we will have still more features to make the online journal more useful.
We fully appreciate the effect of incremental costs on library budgets but value must enter the discussion and we feel that at $1100 for '97 we will protect our revenue and continue to offer the very highest value in life science publishing.
170.3 MAXIMIZATION OF VALUE
Jean Lenville, University of Richmond, lenville@urvax.urich.edu.
I read with interest the item by Beverley Bruce of MCB in issue no.169, and was surprised to find that they consider a three year archival CD- ROM of each separate title a "maximization of value." In my library this is not the case -- we have no way of making such a selective resource available to our students. This, plus the substantial price increases that seem to be directly related, have targeted MCB titles for review and possible cancellation. For example, one title which was $660 for 1994 will be $1240 for 1997. I question the value of single title archiving on CD-ROM and must say that an online model such as Project Muse, with the ability to search multiple titles, seems to provide more value -- at least at present. I appreciate MCB's efforts to keep pace with change, but would like to hear if other libraries find their "integrated approach" preferable to one where the library can chose (and pay for) only those formats which are valuable to them.
170.4 INDEX MORGANAGUS
Eric Lease Morgan, North Carolina State University,
morgan@ncsu.edu.
Please try Index Morganagus, a freetext and field searchable, fulltext index of 34 library-related electronic serials at:
The Index is a demonstration of the Harvest technology and an alternative to the collection of electronic serials. Recent publications have stated that electronic serials are not making an impact on the scholarly communications process. I believe this to be true because electronic serials are not indexed and easily accessible. Yes, electronic serials abound, but no one is going to browse individual issues for articles of interest. Collections of electronic serials must be brought together and indexed collectively. Index Morganagus is an attempt to do just that.
If the Index proves useful, then other indexes can be created for other disciplines. Once these other indexes are created, they can be combined with other Harvest indexes. The sum total of these indexes could prove to be the equivalent of Academic Index while individual indexes could be the equivalent of publications like Library Literature, Biology Abstracts, and MLA Bibliography.
If it can be demonstrated to the scholarly community that electronic publications are a viable means of scholarly communication, then maybe more scholarly communication will take place through freely available electronic serials. Index Morganagus is one demonstration of what can be done.
The Index was created by first using FileMaker Pro to maintain a database of serials. Records from this database were combined using relational database techniques to generate descriptions of Harvest "gatherers" and "brokers." Reports were run against these descriptions to create Perl scripts. These scripts were then uploaded to the Sunsite machine where they were executed and thus created real Harvest gatherers and brokers. Using this model, upkeep of the Index is reduced to maintaining a valid list of serials. Everything else is done "automagically."
At the very least, please consider completing the survey found on the Index's home page. This survey will help determine whether or not to continue the service beyond Easter '97.
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