In the email version of the last issue of the newsletter, 209.6, there was an error in the url for the Metadata working group. The correct url is http://www.bic.org.uk/rights.html. The error was corrected for the web version.
210.2 CESSATION OF BUSINESS - EBSCO DOCUMENT SERVICES
Letter from J.T. Stephens to EBSCODOC customers
September 14, 1998
With regret EBSCO announces our departure from the traditional document delivery business. We encourage you to shift your document ordering to other suppliers as soon as possible. We will not accept new orders after September 25. We will ship or cancel all outstanding orders by September 30.
We thank you for selecting EBSCO as your document delivery provider. We also thank our team of hard-working personnel at EDS for their commitment to the customer, and for doing the job well. We are proud of our record of order fulfillment and customer service.
Our decision comes after significant deliberation and with regret. EBSCO acquired a business providing document delivery in the traditional manner in 1994. Since then, we have reengineered operations to enhance performance. Major systems reengineering has been an ongoing, yet unfinished, process. Our decision stems from our sense of industry transition, and a judgment of unacceptable economics. In today's world, a document delivery company faces government-subsidized competition, increasingly costly and restrictive publisher licensing, and the need for significant technical investment with very low cost/revenue margins to provide a return on this investment.
With regard to the future, EBSCO Information Services has medium-term plans, with no specific target date, for offering an alternate form of document delivery. We believe that buying information by the document is useful and has a future, but that document delivery will migrate to immediate electronic access from publisher-licensed electronic storage. EBSCO is currently releasing an acquisition and access service for online journal subscriptions, EBSCO Online, which will either store or remotely access full text content for subscription customers. Over time, we will be extending our systems and publisher licensing to make EBSCO Online an electronic document delivery source.
Also in the future with no specific target date, EBSCO may make available, for customer convenience, the ability to place from EBSCO's online products a document order which will be forwarded to a third-party document supplier....
210.3 SSP SEMINAR ON ARCHIVING, OCTOBER 30, 1998
Judy Luther, Informed Strategies, jluther@earthlink.net
Archiving is one of three seminars offered by the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) in DC the end of October. Led by Linda Beebe of Parachute Publishing and Barbara Meyers of Meyers Consulting, this day-long seminar will provide librarians background on the technology and current issues facing publishers. Titled "HOW CAN YOU BE SURE YOUR CONTENT WILL SURVIVE?" faculty include:
Greg Suprock, The Sheridan Press
Marie Hansen, Johns Hopkins University Press
Mary Barber, The Ecological Society of America
Sarah Sully, JSTOR
Scott MacFarland, Institute for Electrical and Electronic
Engineers
John Tagler, Elsevier Science
Richard Kaser, National Federation of Abstracting & Information
Services
Mary Case, Association of Research Libraries
Libraries are no longer assuming the full burden of archiving. CDs are disintegrating within a few short years. Some content has already been lost because there is no access to the medium. How will you ensure that your content survives? And how will readers know how to find it? Attend this important seminar to learn what the latest research reveals about archiving. Faculty from large and small publishing operations will give you solid information about their approach to maintaining their content. You will learn about technical options and about changing roles and expectations, as well as about planning to derive subsequent products from your original content. Archiving has become a major concern for all publishers. Plan now to attend SSP's Archiving seminar in October to learn how you can ensure survival for your publications.
Topics include
* Overview of Current Research
* Dialogue on Technical Options
* Archiving an All-Electronic Product: The MUSE Approach
* Preserving Access to Content: The Ecological Society and JSTOR
Partnership
* Archiving from a Society Perspective: The IEEE Approach
* Archiving in a Commercial Scientific Publisher: The Elsevier
Approach
* Accessing the Archive: Metadata, Linking, Object Resolution,
and Authentication
* The Changing Roles in Archiving
The seminar will take place at the ASAE Building, 1575 I Street, NW, Washington, DC. Registration Fees (Include lunch and breaks):
SSP Member until October 9: $195.00/ October 10 or later: $245.00
Non-Member until October 9: $245.00/ October 10 or later: $295.00
For more information, call SSP at 303-422-3914. Send name, address, telephone, and email address with payment to SSP Seminars, 10200 West 44th Avenue, Suite 304, Wheat Ridge, CO 80033-2840. Or fax with credit card number (Visa, Mastercard, or American Express) and expiration date to 303-422-8894. Registrants will receive directions to the seminar location with their confirmation packet.
210.4 GORDON AND BREACH DEFINITIVE PRICED JOURNALS
Marisa Westcott, Gordon and Breach, marisa.westcott@gbhap.com
More than 75 Gordon and Breach and Harwood Academic journals are definitively priced for the year. We have made a commitment to subscribers that there will be no supplemental billings for additional material during the course of the year.
Most G&B/HAP journals publish under the 'flow' system, which, while a benefit to authors, may cause a degree of uncertainty in the finality of the announced subscription rate. This system allows for an unexpected amount of accepted papers to publish quickly without being constrained by page limits. Therefore, the initial subscription offering has in the past been subject to further invoicing during the year.
In response to input from libraries, and in order to facilitate proper library budget allocation, G&B/HAP have selected more than one third of their journal list to be designated "definitive," which means invoices will be generated only once for volumes projected to publish in the next calendar year. The initial subscription offering is final; it will be the only one during the given year. Although definitive journals are subject to annual price increases, you will be invoiced only once each year for a minimum three years.
For a full list of definitive priced journals please go to our website at http://www.gbhap.com/definitive_price
210.5 GORDON AND BREACH MONTHLY/BIMONTHLY PUBLICATIONS
Marisa Westcott, Gordon and Breach, marisa.westcott@gbhap.com
Beginning this Autumn, 40 journals will begin publishing on a monthly, or bimonthly, basis. Due to the increased volume of material, we are able to regulate the schedules of publication for subscribers without compromising the speed of publishing for the authors. Pricing is still based on the number of pages to be published in the year. To use Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals as an example, this journal normally published 17 volumes a year. For 1999, we will be publishing 12 monthly volumes by increasing the pages per volume (the overall price will not change from last year). To account for special issues which can only be published for papers that must appear together and when all these papers are ready, we will issue supplementary parts to a volume at no extra cost, for example, Vol. 122 Part I and Vol. 122 Part II. These parts would always accompany the month's regular volume.
These journals are listed on our web site, http://www.gbhap.com/monthly_bimonthly_pubs/. We intend to schedule more journals in this manner in subsequent years so that subscribers will expect to receive one volume each month or every two months.
210.6 AMERICAN SCIENTIST SEPTEMBER FORUM
Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton,
harnad@coglit.soton.ac.uk
[With the editor's apologies for delay in posting. Received September 5, 1998.]
The following proposal to change copyright agreements and funding practises so authors can freely archive their work on the Web has just appeared in Science on Sept. 4, followed by a dissenting Editorial:
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: Who Should Own Scientific Papers? Bachrach et al. Science 1998 September 4: 1459-1460
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5382/1459
EDITORIAL: The Rightness of Copyright. Bloom, F. Science 1998 September 4: 1451.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/281/5382/1451
For the time being, Science is allowing anyone to access both the proposal and the dissenting Editorial by Floyd Bloom (Editor, Science) for free (after some signup procedures) at:
Discussion (including quote/comments from the proposal and the Editorial) is invited in the Forum below [not a USENET group].
Read the papers, and then comment at:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html
Here are some highlights:
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: Who Should Own Scientific Papers?
Steven Bachrach, R. Stephen Berry, Martin Blume, Thomas von Foerster, Alexander Fowler, Paul Ginsparg, Stephen Heller, Neil Kestner, Andrew Odlyzko, Ann Okerson, Ron Wigington, Anne Moffat*
"...The goals and motivations of scientists writing up their research are very different from those of professional authors, although they may be the same people in different settings. The scientist is concerned with sharing new findings, advancing research inquiry, and influencing the thinking of others. The benefits the scientist receives from publication are indirect; rarely is there direct remuneration for scientific articles. Indeed, scientists frequently pay page charges to publish their articles in journals. The world of the directly paid author is very different. There, the need for close protection of intellectual property follows directly from the need to protect income, making natural allies of the publisher and the professional author, whether a novelist or the author of a chemistry text..."
"...The suggested policy is this: Federal agencies that fund research should recommend (or even require) as a condition of funding that the copyrights of articles or other works describing research that has been supported by those agencies remain with the author. The author, in turn, can give prospective publishers a wide-ranging nonexclusive license to use the work in a value-added publication, either in traditional or electronic form. The author thus retains the right to distribute informally, such as through a Web server for direct interaction with peers..."
"...[Some publishers, such as] Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society, have adamantly opposed authors' posting of their own articles on Web pages or e-print servers, whereas others, such as the American Journal of Mathematics, the Journal of Neuroscience, Nature Medicine, and Physical Review, have considered such distribution consistent with, and even advertising for, their own journals..."
EDITORIAL The Rightness of Copyright: Floyd E. Bloom
"...[C]opyright transfer is critical to the process of communicating scientific information accurately. Neither the public nor the scientific community benefits from the potentially no-holds-barred electronic dissemination capability provided by today's Internet tools. Much information on the Internet may be free, but quality information worthy of appreciation requires more effort than most scientists could muster, even if able...."
Questions for Reflection [SH]:
(1) Is this a logical or even a practical argument for copyright transfer?
(2) Is the only choice really that between free papers, with no quality control, versus quality-controlled papers in exchange for copyright transfer and S/SL/PPV?
"...A paper submitted to Science will undergo extensive review and, upon acceptance, extensive revision for clarity, accuracy, and solidity. A paper published in Science will be seen throughout the world by our 160,000 paid subscribers and perhaps two or three times more readers as issues are shared. More than 30,000 readers will be alerted to the new reports within hours of the appearance each week of Science Online...."
(3) How many journals reach 160K subscribers (or even 1/100 % of that)?
(4) Free posting on the Web can reach all 160K (and 100 times that).
(5) Science magazine is a hybrid trade/refereed journal. It publishes refereed articles, contributed for free, plus commissioned and paid articles by staff writers and others, for fee. Hence it is in most relevant requests not representative of the vast refereed literature of which it (and a few other journals like it, such as Nature) constitutes a minuscule portion.
"...This degree of investment in the scientific publication process requires the assignment of copyright. This allows the society publisher to provide a stewardship over the paper, to protect it from misuse by those who would otherwise be free to plagiarize or alter it, and to expand the distribution of information products for the benefit of the society.
(6) Do we need this degree of investment? Is it worth the consequences (S/SL/PPV, firewalls)?
(7) What is "stewardship"?
(8) What do copyright ASSIGNMENT (to the publisher) and S/SL/PPV have to do with protection from plagiarism or alteration? (Doesn't copyright simpliciter provide that?)
"...Permissions are granted freely to the originating authors for their own uses. Science holds the copyright of its authors because of our belief that we materially improve and protect the product we create together...."
(9) What if the "own use" is the provision of one's work to others, through free public archiving on the Web?
(10) Would payment for the cost of the improvements not be sufficient, without the need for copyright assignment, S/SL/PPV and firewalls?
[Again, this should all be considered in conjunction with the fact that Science magazine is far from representative of refereed journals, for the reasons noted above.]
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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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