RE: Nature Journals: User Name and Password (Super ID Access)

[Kurt de Belder <kbelder@uba.uva.nl>]

I need to disagree with the comments of both Rick Anderson and John Cox.
The new Nature license states that certain portions in the magazine will
only become available electronically to institutional subscribers after a
12 issue delay.  This is not a question of not having the rights to make
these items available electronically.  It is a profit question.  For the
past year, Nature has published every week the complete magazine
electronically and has made it available to a number of institutional
subscribers on a trial basis.  It also took the publisher MacMillan more
than a year to design a license and a pricing strategy.  This month it
became clear that their strategy is clearly focused on expanding the
number of individual subscriptions to the electronic (and print) version
of the magazine, while also trying to maintain the institutional
subscription base.  In other words: if a reader wants the most recent and
important articles from Nature she will not be able to find it in a
library or through an institutional subscription, but the reader will need
to buy her own subscription.  Although our users at the University of
Amsterdam have been enthusiastic for the past year about the electronic
COMPLETE version of Nature, this University Library will not sign an
institutional license that only grants our readers access to information
with a delay of three months.

Kurt De Belder

--------------------------------------------------- 
Kurt De Belder
Chief, Division of Electronic Services
University Library, Universiteit van Amsterdam
 
mailto:kurt.de.belder@uba.uva.nl
http://www.uba.uva.nl
Tel.: +31 20 525 3672
Fax.: +31 20 525 2311
 
Singel 421-425
1012 WP Amsterdam
The Netherlands
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At 19:09 18-9-00 EDT, Rick Anderson wrote:
>I'm a naive person by nature (no pun intended in the context of this
>thread), but I guess I don't really see the problem here.  If the
>publisher of a nonacademic magazine normally buys first-time rights only
>and publishes only in print, and then begins marketing an online version,
>then it has two choices: either continue paying its writers for what it's
>gotten in the past (first-time rights) and leave content from those
>writers out of the online version (thus making it unattractive, as David
>points out) or begin purchasing universal rights from its writers.  Will
>that be more expensive? Yes, but isn't the publisher going to be selling
>the online content?  The cost of those rights should be factored into the
>online pricing.  That will make the online product more expensive, but we
>librarians ought to expect that writers be paid for their work just like
>we expect to be paid for ours.
>
>Rick Anderson