Re: electronic journals CCC

["Peter B. Boyce" <pboyce@aas.org>]

Tony Watkinson's comment on Tom Williams statement that "Publishers as a
group would love to see "Fair Use" and Contu guidelines go away" is right
on the mark. Publishers are not a "group." They have different motivations
for publishing, different charging schemes, and even different overall
costs. Nor are electronic journals all comparable. They range the gamut
from simple electronic delivery of paper pages (e.g. only in PDF format)
to fully linked journals which are well integrated into a fully
interoperating, distributed, electronic information system (such as the
astronomical community has put in place).

The American Astronomical society has, since 1995, allowed electronic
interlibrary loan of the paper page images (the PDF files). We do this for
three reasons,:

1. Our underlying motivation to publish is to further the distribution of
knowledge. We do not use our journal income to support other programs of
the Society.

2. According to the feedback we have, the major value of our journals lies
in the abundant links to the references we provide to abstracts, to full
text, to machine readable data tables, to astronomical databases, and to
supplementary information relevant to the articles. These links, along
with the electronic-only information, are lost when only the PDF files are
available. Only the electronic version of our articles contain the
complete set of information. The paper version is not the version of
record.

3. The distribution of the emasculated version via PDF files is not a
threat to our journal circulation. On the contrary, such distribution
serves as advertising for our journals. We also let authors post the PDF
files of their papers both on their own Web site as well as on the Los
Alamos e-print servers. This has not posed an economic problem for us.

So, from our standpoint, ILL is a non-issue, and I hope that, as more
electronic journals provide expanded services and time-saving features for
users, the idea of shipping around images of paper pages will soon seem
outmoded to everyone.

Moreover, I believe that from a vantage point five years in the future,
when well linked information systems will have arisen in many fields of
study, the idea that even a single article will be sufficient will also
seem very primitive. In the meantime, I hope we can keep some of our
attention on the longer term goals, and how we can bring them to fruition.


_________________________________________________________
Peter B. Boyce    -   Senior Consultant for Electronic Publishing, AAS
email: pboyce@aas.org   http://www.aas.org/~pboyce

33 York St., Nantucket, MA 02554
Phone:  508-228-9062
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