Re: Nature Journals: User Name and Password (Super ID Access)

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

I agree with Kurt de Belder to the extent that I suspect strongly that
Rick and John are correct in not seeing this as a rights question as far
as Nature or, for that matter, Science are concerned but it always worries
me when the word "profit" is used in what appears to be a pejorative
sense. Would not the word "profit-or-loss" be a better term? As I
understand it (and in my experience when I had intellectual property
responsibility for some of the Current Opinion journals) the big concern
for any publisher responsible for a journal with a significant number of
individual subscribers is whether they will lose a lot of them should the
library these subscribers use have an electronic licence to the complete
journal. Perhaps Mr de Belder has inside knowledge of Macmillan strategy
but I would be very surprised if the policy concerned was aimed at
increasing individual subscribers. More likely it was an attempt to hold
on to them.

Anthony Watkinson
14, Park Street, Bladon, Woodstock,
Oxon, England OX20 1RW
phone +44 1993 811561 and fax 1993  810067

----- Original Message -----
From: Kurt de Belder <kbelder@uba.uva.nl>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2000 5:09 AM
Subject: RE: Nature Journals: User Name and Password (Super ID Access)


> I need to disagree with the comments of both Rick Anderson and John Cox.
> The new Nature license states that certain portions in the magazine will
> only become available electronically to institutional subscribers after a
> 12 issue delay.  This is not a question of not having the rights to make
> these items available electronically.  It is a profit question.  For the
> past year, Nature has published every week the complete magazine
> electronically and has made it available to a number of institutional
> subscribers on a trial basis.  It also took the publisher MacMillan more
> than a year to design a license and a pricing strategy.  This month it
> became clear that their strategy is clearly focused on expanding the
> number of individual subscriptions to the electronic (and print) version
> of the magazine, while also trying to maintain the institutional
> subscription base.  In other words: if a reader wants the most recent and
> important articles from Nature she will not be able to find it in a
> library or through an institutional subscription, but the reader will need
> to buy her own subscription.  Although our users at the University of
> Amsterdam have been enthusiastic for the past year about the electronic
> COMPLETE version of Nature, this University Library will not sign an
> institutional license that only grants our readers access to information
> with a delay of three months.
>
> Kurt De Belder
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> Kurt De Belder
> Chief, Division of Electronic Services