Re: Ebsco Full-Text Databases Post

["Michael Spinella" <mspinell@aaas.org>]

David,

You have referenced Science Express here as an example of situations where
"the paper" version is more complete". This is nonsense. Science Express
articles do not appear in print. Ever. And every article that appears in
the print Science is posted to Science Online on the same date it first
appears in print. All print articles are available at the same time,
without embargo, to all individual members as well as to all readers at
subscribing institutions.

Mike Spinella

______________________

>>> dgoodman@Princeton.EDU 04/01/01 08:14PM >>>
Since Marg cited me, I'd like to further explain what I meant:

In most scientific journals that are published as a paper journal and also
in electronic form, either the two are identical or the electronic form
has enriched content, as videos and the like, and should be regarded as
the version of record, as more and more publishers are doing.

There are two types of cases where the opposite occurs, and the paper
version is more complete:

a. There are some journals which provide the complete electronic version
only to individual subscribers, and a truncated or partially embargoed
electronic version to libraries: Nature is the most noteworthy, but
Sciences's "Science Express" preprints are another example.

b. many articles in the Gale and Ebsco databases are not complete. Full
text is meaningless: it can mean either: The full article, as contrasted
to an abstract, with the full article including the figures and so on --
I've heard it suggested we switch to the term "full page images" for
these.  Or the full text, in the sense of ascii text, without the figures
etc. I think we should call these "ascii text only" or "full ascii text
only". I would suggest that the aggregator vendors such as Ebsco and Gale
consider selling a databases made up of ONLY those journals for which they
have full page images. Maybe they even do now, and I just haven't figured
it out among their many choices.

With respect to reading and scanning ease, my experience is that most
really rapid readers, a group including university faculty, find it much
faster to read on paper than on the screen. Even they prefer e-journals;
they just print a copy, and read it.

Scanning is a problem. I have yet to see an electronic version of a
journal whose table of contents is as usable as the print version. Much
experimentation and ingenuity is needed here.  Discovering relevant items
by accident is probably the least efficient way of doing so; surely
semi-random search algorithms will be developed.

Princeton switched to electronic only for almost all the Academic Press
journals and has had no complaints at all.

--
David Goodman
Biology Librarian
and Co-chair, Electronic Journals Task force
Princeton University Library
Princeton, NJ 08544-0001
phone: 609-258-3235
fax: 609-258-2627
e-mail: dgoodman@princeton.edu