Re: Per View E-Journal Article Services

["anthony.watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@BTinternet.com>]

As a former publisher, who has felt for some time that offering single
articles electronically was an obvious step to take assuming a satisfactory
micropayment arrangement, I am greatly encouraged by this news. The problem
has been that many publishers, non-profit and profit alike, have been
worried about easy availability of individual articles because they see this
availability as undermining subscription income. There is also the delay in
serious thinking on this point which has resulted from the difficulty of
getting a reliable supply of electronic files and also the appropriate
infrastructure.

 It seems to me probable that decisions on which subscriptions a library can
afford to pay are not going to be influenced by electronic availability of
individual articles. Concepts of core and non-core and of course money are
the influential factors. However there is little evidence on this point and,
for example, even the senior staff of UnCover, with whom I talked on this
matter at the last Charleston conference, were divided on whether, from a
publishing viewpoint, such availability might or might not have a negative
impact.

As many of you will know, the leading vendors/agents in their online
aggregation offerings potentially can offer single articles to
non-subscribers electronically, but, as I understand it, they have not moved
forward very rapidly on implementing this service, not just because of
publisher reluctance but also because of unclear signals coming from the
library community.

What I can tell Gerry Mckiernan, on the basis of a large number of recent
conversations with British learned society publishers for another purpose,
is that opinion in that sector at any rate appears to be shifting in favour
of allowing the sale of single articles over the Web and that this is likely
to be through the sort of seamless services he is keen on.

But there is also the question of cost. It is not much good articles being
available in this way if the cost is prohibitive - is it?

Anthony Watkinson
-----Original Message-----
From: Gerry Mckiernan <GMCKIERN@gwgate.lib.iastate.edu>
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Date: 23 September 1998 07:10
Subject: Per View E-Journal Article Services


                  _Per View E-Journal Article Services_

    To my pleasant surprise, I recently learned that the American
Chemical Society and the American Institute of Physics began offering
full-text Web individual journal articles for sale over the Web.
As noted in a summer issue of _The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing_
"Single articles are available for sale both to subscribers and to the
general public, as well as to libraries, universities and other
institutional customers." [June 1, 1998, v.2., no.10]

    I am greatly interested in learning about _other_ such services
that offer *Per View / Pay-As-You-Use / Per Drink * access to
_e-journal_ articles, preferrably for non-subscribers. [I am not interested
in FAX (or other) non electronic delivery for this access option]

    I am most interested in those services that can provide **seemless**
integration with existing E-Journal services provided by Aggregators
or Abstracting and Indexing Services.

    As Always, Any and All Contributions, Queries, Questions, Concerns,
Critiques, Comments, etc. are most well.

    Joy!

Gerry McKiernan
Theoretical Librarian
and
Curator, CyberStacks(sm)
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck@iastate.edu
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/

  "The Best Way to Predict the Future is To Invent It!"
Alan Kay