National Online: Nature and Others...

[David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

If any of you will be attending, I will be giving a talk at the ELIBRARIES
part of National Online in NYC on Tuesday at 1:45 PM, as follows:

Nature and others: Restricted electronic access, and financial
discrimination

David Goodman, Princeton University Library

ABSTRACT:

The wide adoption of electronic access to journals, while it facilitates
the sharing of individual copies, and the wide accessibility of
institutional copies, tends to decrease the incentive for individual
subscriptions. This has tempted a number of publishers to experiment with
limiting institutional access for electronic versions of journals. The
form this limitation presently takes is to make the entire journal
available to individual subscribers, with institutional subscribers having
access only to some portions, and the rest available only after a
crippling time delay or totally unavailable. The most notorious recent
case is that of Nature and the Nature monthlies. The individual subscriber
got the full content electronically; the institutional subscriber got the
very high quality primary research articles, but not the almost equally
widely-read science news and summaries of major scientific articles,
except after a three month delay. (As the result of the intervention of
many librarians and faculty, especially the ones who typically contribute
articles for Nature, this policy has just been reversed, but there are
remaining major difficulties with the contracts.)

Science, without making public announcement, has just added
pre-publication versions of some of its key articles available
electronically, but only to individual, not institutional, subscribers.
For the "Current Trends" group of journals now owned by Elsevier, only the
most expensive of the several options for electronic access gives the
whole publication, instead of only the signed review articles This is not
just a problem with scientific journals: Chronicle of Higher Education
individual subscriptions include free complete electronic access; only the
paper is available to institutions. Meanwhile, some selected content is
made available free to the general public. Tendencies such as this if
widely adopted could destroy the usefulness of libraries in providing
information to the entire community, restricting effective access only to
those who could individually afford it.

(Because of the current interest in this topic, I agreed to change the
planned subject, which was originally: Removal of the distinction between
books and journals in electronic catalogs.)


David Goodman, Princeton University Biology Library				
dgoodman@princeton.edu            609-258-3235