Issues of Electronic Journals
Background
- What is an electronic journal (with thanks to Stan Lyle)
- Individual publication online
- Publisher's collection - individual titles directly accessible, e.g., Project Muse,
IDEAL
- Aggregator's collection - content tied to indexing information, titles submerged, e.g.,
InfoTrac, ProQuest
- Integrators - links indexing to full text at publishers' sites
- Document delivery services - some full text available for network access
- Costs
- General problem of rising journal
costs (SPARC/ Highwire vs. Elsevier/Kluwer/etc.)
Create Change - (initiative to fight
rising journal prices sponsored by ARL, ACRL, and SPARC).
Rising costs during subscription period (no fixed price).
- Costs of
adding/accessing e-journal
- online version free with print subscription
- online extra 5-30% of the cost of print
- online only
- Note the many "costs" of free e-journals or free access (cataloging, indexing,
advertising, web maintenance)
- Costs of printing online fulltext articles within the library (ARL SPEC Kit 254).
- Required to buy "bundles" (that may include unwanted journals) rather than
purchasing specified journals?
- Cancel print to save costs?
- Elsevier Model (ScienceDirect) removes control - no reductions in total subscription
costs allowed.
- Journal Features
- Full text: plain text
- Full text: HTML, SGML
- Full text plus images: graphics, multimedia
- Full images: JPG, TIFF, PDF
- Persistent identifiers, e.g., DOIs
- Archiving
- Hyperlinks to other E-Journals
- Printing/Downloading/E-mail
- The Future
- What is the future of print journals - cancel? - no longer published? --- Note print
journals may not disappear in the near future as e-journal advertising has failed to
produce much revenue.
- Longevity, stability, and accessibility of electronic journals.
- Long term access to archives - what happens if the library must cancel its subscription?
- what happens if the vendor disappears? - what happens if the publisher disappears? - if
the journal ceases publication? - JSTOR.
- Mergers, buyouts --> monopolization.
Implementation Issues
- Licensing Issues
- Who will be responsible within the library?
- Must licenses be cleared with a higher authority on campus? (Note ISU & U of I
vs UNI).
- Learning curve for librarian responsible for licenses:
- listservs help
- websites help
- ARL - Licensing Electronic
Resources,
- ARL Licensing Issues,
- ARL Principles for
Licensing Electronic Resources,
- ARL SPEC Flyer 248,
- Canadian National Site Licensing Project
- Liber Licensing Principles
for Electronic Information,
- Licensing Digital
Information (Yale University Library),
- Licensingmodels.com,
- Principles for Acquiring and
Licensing Information in Digital Formats (University of California Libraries),
- Software and
Database License Agreement Checklist (University of Texas),
- Standardized
Agreement Language - CIC,
- Statement of Current
Perspectives and Preferred Practices for the Selection and Purchase of Electronic
Information - ICOLC.
- Must often deal with sales people who do not understand legal aspects or
software/hardware aspects of the products they sell.
- Time consumption!
- Many different licenses for many different publishers & aggregators.
Solution?: give a third party - vendor - the power to write contracts.
- Uniformity/predictability and clarity of license agreement (at this time varies from
state to state and from publisher to publisher).
- Potentially contentious issues
- Which state's laws govern contract?
- Number of simultaneous users
- Walk-in users
- Remote users
- Use in ILL
- Use in E-reserves
Why worry about copyright?
"In the United States, a straightforward copyright case can cost as much as US
$250,000 (ATS 3,800,000); a complex one will cost much more"
(Cox, 2000, Serials Review vol. 26 no. 1)
- Ease of compliance
- Patron Education (see MIT site - e.g. MIT
VERA:Virtual Electronic Resource Access)
- Library Staff Education
- Role of consortia
- Renewal process: changes in conditions and contracts
- Ownership of archives if cancelled?
- Presentation and Retrieval
- Indexing/searching:
- Access Vendor Lists
- Download and manipulate vendor lists for local use
- Create lists of ejournals on Web site for browsing
- Create local database with Web search interface
- Search External Database
- Add ejournals to OPAC -- Cataloging Issues (CONSER Cataloging Manual)
- If the ejournal titles are represented in the catalog in their print format, should URLs
be added to existing records?
- Or should new records be created or imported into the system?
- Should entries be made for titles which link to a different bibliographic entity, such
as an aggregator's database?
- How can libraries make it clear what users are connecting to when they follow the links?
- Should there be extra note fields that describe the scope of the electronic versions of
the resources?
- Should there be links to associated information, such as the entries in a Jake database or explanatory information at a service
provider's site?
- Should the OPAC use one record or seperate records for multiple versions of an item?
- Ejournal searchability: Is it possible to search more than one e-journal at a time by
author, keyword, title, subject from a single sophisticated search engine?
- Patron education - library staff education
- Resource integration
- Links from catalog to full text (856)
(some UNISTAR examples: "Africa
Today," "Arethusa")
- Links from indexes to catalog ("hook
to holdings")
- Links from indexes to full text (SilverLinker)
- Links from full text to full text (CrossRef)
Comments: Jerry V. Caswell or
Chris Neuhaus
Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa
1227 W. 27th St., Cedar Falls, IA 50613-3675
URL: http://www.uni.edu/caswell/klg/klgejrnl.htm
Revised: 21 May 2002