[Received March 12, 1998]
As the president of a small, exclusively electronic press, I'm writing to solicit feedback from collections development staff with responsibility for acquisition of electronically distributed resources.
MEMEX Press was founded a little over a year ago by a small group of scientists and educators with the ultimate goal of realizing (not merely talking to death) the full potential of exclusively electronic publishing in science, technology, medicine and education. Our first modest proof-of-principle publication, "Critical Comparisons of American Colleges and Universities" has been available free-to-all for the last year (at http://www.memex-press.com/cc), but its surprising popularity with university administrators has moved us to institute a policy (as of 1 April 1998) of requiring a modestly priced institutional subscription for browsers accessing "CC" from .edu domains.
Recently, we conducted a test e-mailing to some 250 collection development librarians, announcing this new access policy and providing information on how to subscribe. While the response has been overwhelmingly positive, a small (but nonetheless worrisome) fraction of recipients of this e-mailing responded by informing us that under no conditions would they consider a subscription solicitation submitted to them via e-mail, and would instead require that printed materials be snail-mailed to them.
Frankly, I'm surprised by this minority response. Having spent over ten years as faculty liaison to the collection development staff at my previous institution's library, I'm painfully aware of pricing issues such as those regularly discussed in this newsletter. One of my company's many reasons for attempting to promote EXCLUSIVELY electronic publishing is to demonstrate the dramatic reduction in production costs (and thereby subscription costs) that this enables. We've reasoned that this holds for promotional materials, as well, and we hope to do the vast majority (and perhaps all) of our solicitation via low-cost and environmentally friendly means such as e-mail. Thus, we were very surprised to learn that some librarians are extremely unsympathetic to this approach.
I suspect that the minority who rejected e-mail solicitation may have had concerns regarding our company's legitimacy (MEMEX Press is not yet exactly a household word), and may feel that glossy brochures and computer-addressed bulk mailing demonstrate some measure thereof. Perhaps, as well, a few were reacting from a diffuse hostility toward "spam" (which I share). Scholars who long ago settled the issue of angels-on-a-pin are still arguing over what does and does not constitute "spam," but I should mention that our e- mailings were individually addressed to each recipient by name, no more than one individual at each institution received the mailing, and only individuals listed on their institutions' web sites as the relevant collection development librarian received a mailing.
As I say, the vast majority of recipients of this test mailing responded positively, but the minority response nonetheless concerns me. We most definitely don't want to do business like Elsevier (or any other antediluvian hard-copy publisher) does it, but we know from experience that we face some pretty serious 'paradigm shift' problems when we show up saying "the first thing we do is throw away the paper and the ink!" I would be interested in readers' perspectives regarding whether and how hard-copy promotional materials for electronic publications provide acquisition staff with any real or intangible value.
For reference purposes, an online version of the text we mailed is available at http://www.memex- press.com/subscribe.html
207.2 DEJA MOO? -- ELSEVIER'S LATEST OFFERING
I don't usually pay much attention to the internet humor
that frequently turns up in my email, but this irreverent
bit of fractured French that arrived a week or so ago caught
my eye: "Deja moo: the odd feeling that you have seen this
bullshit before." The cow connection was compelling, of
course. After all, I live in a state which takes its dairy
industry so seriously that one can buy candy products in the
shape of a "cow pies" and where a local festival features a
popular contest in which game (and presumably also gamy)
Wisconsinites test their strength by flinging desiccated
examples of the real thing (cow pies) across the landscape.
But uncannily -- and more relevant to this newsletter --
this one-liner also captured the feeling that had come over
me earlier in the day as I opened a package containing the
first two, complementary issues of Elsevier's new journal,
Inorganic Chemistry Communications (ICC). Not that the new
journal seemed likely to fail a rigorous scientific smell-test. On the contrary, even this non-chemist librarian
immediately recognized that some of its advisors, editors
and early contributors were among the most distinguished
scientists in the field of inorganic and organometallic
chemistry. A quick consultation with several local experts
confirmed that, yes, there were some interesting articles
here and, yes, probably the library should consider a
subscription.
Now, for all I know, organometallic chemists around the
world will rejoice to learn that Elsevier has launched a
new, "rapid communications" journal which promises to do for
this area of chemistry what Tetrahedron Letters has done for
organic chemistry. What worries me, of course, is the likely
impact of this "son-of-Tet-Let" on the library *budget pie.*
At $345 per year to start with ICC may seem harmless enough,
but if past experience is a guide, it will soon be laying
claim to a healthy slice of the library budget. Tetrahedron
Letters, mind you, cost $200 when I was appointed to this
position in the mid 1970's. The 1998 price for libraries is
$7,936.
I would readily concede that Elsevier has been doing some
*good* while doing very well as it has tightened its grip on
science publishing. Scientific publishing provides an
excellent example of the advantages of for-profit
enterprises when it comes to responding quickly to new
circumstances and needs. Elsevier's Journal of
Organometallic Chemistry, for example, was launched
nearly two decades before the American Chemical Society
responded with its own journal in this field
(Organometallics). But I would like to go out on a limb here
and suggest that science libraries may now be paying enough
money to support commercial journals in this one area of
chemistry. ICC joins three other Elsevier offerings in this
area: Journal of Organometallic Chemistry, Inorganica
Chimica Acta, and Polyhedron. The combined subscription
price for these three titles in 1998 was $17,397. If you
multiply that amount by the number of major (ARL) libraries
in the U.S. and Canada (122) you get $2,164,524, a number
which I suspect is a very conservative estimate of how
much money academic libraries in North American are paying
for these three journals. I am guessing that most ARL-size
libraries are subscribers, but if some aren't, then the non-
subscribers will surely be more than offset by subscriptions
to these titles at smaller institutions. Several smaller
branches of my own university system, for example, maintain
subscriptions to two of the three.
The "scholarly communication crisis" that has resulted from
our long-term willingness to spend this kind of money on
science journal subscriptions has been debated and deplored
by librarians for the last twenty years or so--without much
effect. Currently, however, we seem to be in the midst of a
much more vigorous assault on the problem which in its scope
and intensity gives new hope. Most encouraging is the
growing realization of the scientists themselves in *some*
disciplines that they are the key to real progress on the
issue. Without the concern and involvement of those who
edit, review for, publish in, or otherwise support the
journals which fewer and fewer libraries can afford to buy
(whether as print or electronically), the current flurry of
concern will surely fade and we will return to business as
usual. And for science librarians all over the world it will
be -- to paraphrase the immortal words of Yogi Berra -- Deja
moo all over again.
207.3 NATIONAL ELECTRONIC SITE LICENSE INITIATIVE (NESLI)
[Press release received May 5, 1998]
The Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher
Education Funding Councils has appointed a consortium of
Swets & Zeitlinger and Manchester Computing at the
University of Manchester as Managing Agent for the UK
National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI),
subject to the completion of formal contracts.
NESLI is an initiative to deliver a national electronic
journal service to the UK higher education and research
community and is a successor programme to the Pilot Site
Licence Initiative (PSLI). The Managing Agent will undertake
negotiations with publishers, manage delivery of the
electronic material, and oversee the day-to-day operation of
the programme to ensure that it provides value for money
through cost effective operation.
The contract takes effect from May 1st 1998 and journal
delivery will commence from January 1999 for a three year
period.
Swets & Zeitlinger is one of the leading global subscription
agents and the largest in Europe. It has a long tradition of
providing journal subscription services to academic
libraries and institutions, particularly in the UK where it
acts as a supplier to a large number of universities. It has
close links with scholarly and research publishers world-wide
and has been one of the pioneering agents in the development
of gateway services for accessing and managing Internet
based full text journal collections. Further details can be
found on the web at http://www.swets.nl/
Manchester Computing is part of the University of
Manchester, providing local computing services for the
University and UMIST, and specialist dataset services via
MIDAS to the UK higher education community. MIDAS is a JISC-designated national datacentre hosting more than 40
strategic datasets including the UK Census, JSTOR, Beilstein
CrossFire, and satellite data. MC also hosts the COPAC
(Consortium of University Research Libraries OPAC) project
and the eLib SuperJournal Project. Further details can be
found on the web at http://www.midas.ac.uk/
The Consortium's NESLI Web site will be launched in late
June and will provide full information on the programme and
services.
For further information e-mail nesli-ma@man.ac.uk
This announcement is available on the web at URL
http://www.midas.ac.uk/news/nesli_1may98.html
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Ken Rouse, University of Wisconsin, krouse@macc.wisc.edu
Sean Dunne, University of Manchester, s.dunne@mcc.ac.uk
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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The Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues (ISSN: 1046-3410) is published by the editor through Academic and Networking Technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as news is available. Editor: Marcia Tuttle, Internet: marcia_tuttle@unc.edu; Paper mail: 215 Flemington Road, Chapel Hill NC 27514-5637; Telephone: 919 929-3513. Editorial Board: Deana Astle (Clemson University), Christian Boissonnas (Cornell University), Jerry Curtis (Springer Verlag New York), Isabel Czech (Institute for Scientific Information), Janet Fisher (MIT Press), Fred Friend (University College, London), Charles Hamaker (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Daniel Jones (University of Texas Health Science Center), Michael Markwith (Swets North America), James Mouw (University of Chicago), and Heather Steele (Blackwell's Periodicals Division). The Newsletter is available on the Internet, Blackwell's CONNECT, and Readmore's ROSS. EBSCO customers may receive the Newsletter in paper format.
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