Re: Is it time to stop printing journals?

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I work as a publisher in an area where many of the journals are 
membership journals and the members often do not have access to 
an academic library. These are specialist dentists who do not 
write papers for learned journals but need to keep up with the 
research. In Europe such people seem to be able to access an 
e-version but there is a general view in the US that the US 
equivalents need print. I wonder if this is one of those areas 
where generalisations do not work and one size does not fit all 
or are the publishers or rather the learned societies who partner 
with them are being too conservative in their approach to saving 
money?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Greg Tananbaum" <gtananbaum@gmail.com> 
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu> 
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 12:49 AM 
Subject: Re: Is it time to stop printing journals?


> Scott Plutchak from UAB writes in his blog response:
>
> "We certainly don't need to keep the print to satisfy our user
> base.  Two years ago we stopped getting any print for our
> ScienceDirect titles.  I did not get a single question, comment,
> or expression of concern from faculty or students.  We've reached
> the point where librarians tend to worry a lot more about the
> print than the people who use our libraries do."
>
> I am curious to hear whether this is a commonly held sentiment.
> In other words, do the librarians on this list have the sense
> that their patrons are operating in a post-print world (not in
> the OA/PMC/Battle Royale sense of the term, but meaning have we
> outgrown print)?  If so, this would be a remarkable shift, and a
> remarkably quick one.  Certainly when I helped launch The
> Berkeley Electronic Press in 2000, print was sacrosanct.  The
> idea of a viable electronic-only journal publisher was met with
> feedback running the wide gamut from skepticism to scorn.  If
> this equation has indeed flipped in a matter of a half-dozen or
> so years, this ranks as one of the most important periods in
> scholarly communication history.
>
> Best, Greg
>
> Greg Tananbaum
> gtananbaum@gmail.com