No Subject

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

Anne Okerson asks:

AND NOW A QUESTION: Are other journal publishers effecting the same kinds
of changes, i.e., loosening up a little more re. electronic ILL? Which
ones? And which ones, from the get-go, referred librarians to national
law such as US Section 108 for their e-journal policy (I know Highwire
did this).

  ---------------------------------------------------

I have a comment:
The American Astronomical Society has always approved ILL use, 
even  electronic transfer of the page image files (PDF format) subject to 
the usual CONTU guidelines.

We believe that the electronic delivery of page images is not what makes 
people subscribe to an electronic journal. They subscribe for the reference 
links and the forward citation links, and the electronically readable data 
files, and the multimedia enhancements, and the ability to search full 
text,  and all the other good stuff. So, if the page images, which have 
none of these enhancements, get shared in a "fair use" or standard ILL 
scenario, so much the better. If we can't make an electronic journal which 
provides sufficiently more features than page images can, then we probably 
deserve to lose the income.

It is the complete, linked, distributed set of electronic resources which 
are now important to users. Page images are not effectively integrated into 
that system (yet), so they are not nearly as useful to readers as  the full 
electronic journal. In our four years of experience, subscriptions to our 
effective electronic journals have not been canceled because of ILL.  We 
still believe that ILL is really a non-issue. I personally wonder why it 
continues to be an issue with so many publishers.

--Peter Boyce--


____________________________________________
Peter B. Boyce    -   Electronic Publishing Consultant
33 York St., Nantucket, MA 02554
email: pboyce@aas.org	Phone:  508-228-9062
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