RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?

["Margaret Landesman" <margaret.landesman@utah.edu>]

Greg,

Yes.

AND, one of the (older) history professors asked me the other day 
if we couldn't have all the Cambridge books - or at least the 
reference-y ones - online - as we do with Oxford.  I said, "What 
about the print?"  he said, "For the online, we'll be happy to do 
without them."

Margaret Landesman
Utah

PS Our Approval Profile for Oxford now specifies that instead of 
Blackwell automatically sending us a book, they should just 
notify us - send a electronic 'notification slip' - since we are 
buying many Oxford titles online, we are buying less print.


-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Greg Tananbaum
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 5:50 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
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
(510) 295-7504