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Putting a cost to library services
How much does each action in your library cost in the context of your national economy? That may not be a question you think about every day, but the people at LibEcon probably dream about it. LibEcon is creating a statistical database which can be viewed online at its website. It's also looking for country coordinators in our part of the world. more...
INSDOC is no more
For more than half a century, INSDOC served Indian and foreign libraries through its document delivery service and library school. Both may well continue but the old INSDOC is no more. Instead, it has merged with The National Institute of Science Communication to become NISCAIR, The National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources. more...
China business information from Singapore
Singapore's National Library Board with the National Library of China has set up the China Resource Library, an online infoportal for Chinese business information. It offers Chinese ebooks, journals and web resources and it's part of the ASEAN Information Network. more...
Zap them, Harry
Harry Potter didn't have enough magic in 2002 to turn his detractors into toads. Instead, the Harry Potter books once again were the most challenged books in America. Parents and others who don't wish magic in their lives or those of their kids made 515 formal complaints in the USA to have poor Harry removed from libraries and schools. Want to know what the other most challenged books were? more...
India gets its first library consortium
There was a time when India and China were comparable in terms of telecommunications infrastructure and number of R&D personnel. But that has changed. India lags behind China especially in the ability of scientists to access crucial STM databases. So some enterprising folks in India with government support have established a library consortium to bring databases to the desktops of Indian academics. INDEST was recently launched in New Delhi.
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Open access journals get a directory
It's a new sort of publishing, open access. An editorial board either resigns en masse from a commercial publisher to set up a low cost high impact journal, or an organisation like SPARC, brings libraries and academics together to publish a new journal which competes with a much more expensive title. The movement and number of open access titles is growing. So Lund University has gathered them together in a directory.
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Sha La La La La, I Love You
It's that song! You hear it all the time but always miss the credits. But if you live in the UK you're smart enough to call Shazam, a real time music identification service. Just hold the phone near the radio for fifteen seconds and Shazam will tell you the song and the artist. Intrigued? more...
Asian countries get free health ejournals
First it was the very poorest countries in the world getting free access to some of the worlds' more expensive and high impact journals. Now HINARI has expanded the list giving a further 40 countries deeply discounted access. Is your country eligible?
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ACCESS
was lucky enough to meet Dr. Marc H. Brodsky, Executive Director and
CEO of the American Institute of Physics, when he visited Thailand
recently. AIP's Online Journal Publishing Service, OJPS, is one of
the most celebrated and important on the web. Besides its own high
impact journals, it also publishes those of many other societies
including the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Acoustical Society of
America, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and so on. The AIP
has long had very affordable pricing that reflects its mission to
disseminate science research as widely as possible at a cost
manageable by all. So ACCESS
asked, why the new pricing models? With clarity and candour,
Dr. Brodsky explained the new price regimes and touched upon the
open access movement and why interlibrary loans are not good for
scholarly and society publishing.
Why has
your overseas membership grown by 30 percent in the last 10
years?
The societies
that are members of the American Institute of Physics have all
except one used the name 'American' in their title. But
they're not just American organisations. Because of the
meetings that they run and the journals that they publish,
they have become the de facto prime international
organisations in their fields. So people in any country
looking for the best meetings or the best journals to publish
in, choose our members. In the course of things they become
members of the society. Also, as many people study in the
United States, when they return to their countries they want
to keep in touch so they become a member. There is another
huge factor. While overseas membership continues to increase
from 18-19 percent 10 years ago to almost a third today, total
membership has not increased which shows that US membership is
decreasing. It's a reflection of the growing quality and
quantity of research and development world wide. This is
reflected even more drastically if you look at the authorship
in the journals of say the APS or the AIP. The majority of
authors live outside the United States and it's a large
majority. For Physical Review
it's probably three quarters of
the authors and it's two thirds for many of the AIP
journals.
How
important is Asia to the turnover and wellbeing of your
publishing?
Absolutely key
and growing. You can say that about 40 percent of our revenue
from libraries comes from North and South America. The balance
is almost equally divided by Europe, the Middle East and
Asia-Pacific. That's extremely significant. For the most part,
if we look at the revenue to our journals from any given
country, it's almost proportional to their GDP and it's almost
more or less proportional to the authorship. China is the
exception. Authorship is larger percentage-wise than the
revenue we get from Chinese libraries. That's beginning to
change with the last two years seeing a remarkable shift in
the number of subscriptions from Chinese libraries. It's
getting closer to the percent of their GDP.
How do
you see India? Does it conform to the same set of
conditions?
We get a lot of
contributions from India and we see a lot of activity in
computer science. We've not seen a huge increase in library
subscriptions. But we expect that to change as economic growth
in India gathers pace.
Why are
you changing your subscription structure to resemble that of
the major commercial publishers? Isn't your strength as a
society publisher that you can go your own way?
The reason we're
going into tiered pricing is fairness. Certain institutions
use our material, be it as authors or subscribers, much more
than others. Our pricing structure and the support of the
Institute is based on fairness. So all the stake holders
should pay their fair share of the cost of production and
distribution. Someone has to pay; there's no free lunch as we
say. The question is who? There are many different models.
Some people think that anybody who looks at a journal on the
web shouldn't pay anything. But some of those people are
learning that there is a cost to running a publishing
operation and they have now started charging authors or their
employers. We looked at many ways of contributing to the cost
of the Institute. We get some membership dues, we have
advertising, we have voluntary page charges for authors in
some of our journals: all this contributes. We have some
individual subscriptions, but by far the largest percentage or
revenue comes from library subscriptions. We have to look at
that to ensure that each pays their fair share. There are
small colleges with a couple of professors who occasionally
look at the journals; and there are others such as the MITs
and Stanfords as well as research-intensive universities in
Asia where every day hundreds of people are looking at the
journals. So it doesn't make sense to charge everybody the
same rate.
Do you
go along with recent calls from the open access movement to
make freely available all science literature six months after
its publication date?
The people
promoting this are dealing with several false premises. They
don't understand that somebody has to pay for mounting and
maintaining quality information, vetting it, indexing it,
preserving it, archiving it and so on. Let me deal with some
of the false premises. One is the web is cheap, but of course
it's not inexpensive to maintain in a disciplined manner
published material on the web. They're learning that. So the
people advocating open access have learned that now they have
to find somebody to pay for it - be it authors or George Soros
or a foundation. Second, they try to convince others that
there's not particularly good access today by traditional
publishing methods. I would contend that more people are
seeing more information today than ever before and there is
not a huge problem. There is a problem for some library
budgets and we are addressing that. But, there's not a problem
of people having access. Indeed, for most society publishers,
including the AIP, APS and our other member societies, all our
tables of contents and abstracts are freely available. This is
remarkable. As the literature is published and you go on the
web, you can see everything down to the abstract. You can do
searching, find the material and if you want to see the full
text, the societies hope you will pay your fair share. We have
many, many inexpensive options from big consortia deals that
small libraries can join to traditional subscriptions and
single article sales which are probably cheaper than the
process of one library giving it away to another. It's a
remarkable system that has given more people more access than
ever before. This arbitrary 'six months later it will be free'
ignores that somebody has to pay. And who will it be? It's
obviously the current subscribers. So once again I go back to
fairness with everybody paying their fair share. In the
physics community we charge people for backfiles as opposed to
saying that after time they get them free because it costs us
money to scan old issues, put them on the web, index them,
link to and from them... So it's a very difficult and expensive
process. The open access people are going down the wrong path.
My prediction is that many of these open access methods will
be open access for a while until somebody realises that it has
to be paid for or else it will disappear, or we'll go back to
the traditional publishing method.
OJPS is
very generous in providing lots of free information and
services. How would you summarise your free
offerings?
The table of
contents for all our issues and abstracts are free. We've just
started experimenting with extending free searching to
non-subscribers. That's free searching down to the abstract
level of nearly 400,000 articles for anybody, anywhere. Some
alerting services are also free, depending on the
publisher.
Dr. Marc H. Brodsky, CEO,
American Institute of Physics
There
are publishers who are concerned about excessive downloading
of their products. Does this also concern you?
We regularly monitor downloading by
looking at the top 10, 25, 100 downloads of any journal at any
time. The patterns vary. There are some institutions,
especially in Asia, where the culture is to download a lot
more than elsewhere. We worry about excessive downloads and we
put certain restraints on it. We don't allow folks to download
one article after another faster than they can read them. So
we block robots. We will temporarily block and write a polite
note asking why they downloaded as much as they did. So we
have ways to deal with this, mostly emphasizing fairness and
preventing overload on our servers. Our license agreement does
not allow systematic downloading - an entire journal issue for
example.
Does
interlibrary loan of electronic journal articles concern
you?
Interlibrary loan is an archaic
term. Nothing is being loaned. Something is being given away
or resold. Some libraries charge each other fees or have
barter arrangements so they're actually reselling and
republishing our material in some cases. Libraries that track
their costs know that it costs them more to do an interlibrary
loan than to come into our site and buy a single article. For
our electronic products, our license agreement generally does
not allow interlibrary loan of electronic copies. And we
expect the borrowing library to come to our site if they want
a single article or to go to a document delivery service that
pays royalties. Since the invention of the photocopier we've
seen a decline in subscriptions. Some libraries claim that
photocopying does not affect subscription rates, but it does
because of the significant number of people who opt out of the
system by deciding not to have a subscription and rely instead
on document delivery without charge. This puts a burden on the
remaining libraries that pay for their subscriptions and are
paradoxically supplying non-subscribing libraries with copies.
Now we've got the web and all this stuff is there, it's just
as easy to go to the publisher's site and buy a copy. The need
for that alternative publishing and redistribution system -
interlibrary loan - is going away except for those people who
don't want, or more generously, cannot pay their fair
share.
Do
you permit authors who publish with you to post their papers
on their own or other websites?
We certainly do because authors
always like to keep copies of their articles for friends or
colleagues to see.
That's another way for librarians to
get hold of a paper.
Yes, that's an unfortunate side
effect. We ask authors to post on their web site the links to
the publisher of their article and to ask people who want
copies to go to that site.
What
refinements have you planned for your service in the next 2-3
years?
Electronic publishing on the web is
a world of unbounded opportunity. Unfortunately we all have
bounded budgets! We have to pick and choose where we're going.
We have a huge menu of potential improvements and functions.
One is improved searching, for example, full text; another is
to increase our backfiles to the first journal we ever
published; another is to improve navigation with different
types of linking. We already have forward and backward
citation linking. I see more inter-publisher interactions in
linking, and I see more integration of the whole process from
manuscript submission through the referee and review stage
right to online publishing.
AIP offers free searching to
non-subscribers
The
American Institute of Physics is offering free
searching of all the bibliographic records on its
Online Journal Publishing Service (OJPS) for which
PDF files of full text articles are available. To
date, searching has been restricted to those who
subscribe to at least one of the more than 100
journals on the OJPS platform. The name of the new
service is Search OJPS
, and
it is accessible on a six month experimental basis
to anyone who registers.
The
service has similar functionality to SPIN
(Searchable Physics Information Notices), AIP's
abstracts database. Users may browse or search
bibliographic data from 110 online journals
published by AIP and other scientific and
engineering societies, with various options for
accessing full text articles. Search OJPS enables
fielded, cross-journal searching on more than
300,000 abstract records. Users may also browse
tables of contents (with links to abstracts) for
each of these journals for this same time period.
Within each of these areas, options are provided
for users to obtain the full text articles. Users
may directly download PDF files from journals to
which they or their institutions subscribe, or
they may use the pay-per-view facilities of AIP's
DocumentStore
to purchase full text
articles from publications to which they do not
subscribe.
Search OJPS provides a
convenient research resource for searching across
multiple journals on the OJPS, including journals
published by AIP, American Physical Society,
Russian Academy of Sciences, ASME International,
and American Society of Civil Engineers. Users are
required to register, and the service is
accessible through a number of links, including
links on the AIP
homepage, OJPS
homepage, AIP's DocumentStore, SPIN
abstracts database, and
journals on the OJPS
platform.
Why has
your overseas membership grown by 30 percent in the last 10
years?
