Re: disappearing years of sold journals

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

I want to underscore what Ed has written here. Publishers are very aware
of the problems raised by these sort of transfers but it is one of these
areas where there is no convention. Much of publisher/publisher relations
works by convention. As US readers will know publishers are crippled by
fears of anti-trust, because these are business terms, in coming to
general agreements - at least that is my picture There is, nevertheless, a
move to reaching suggested guidelines. I know the views of librarians will
help the formulation of these guidelines

Anthony Watkinson

----- Original Message -----
From: ED BARNAS <ebarnas@cup.org>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>; Kimberly Parker
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 11:56 PM
Subject: Re: disappearing years of sold journals

As was already noted in this thread, publishers do not necessarily own
everything that they publish. More than a third of the journals that are
published by Cambridge University Press are done on behalf of scholarly
societies and associations such as the New Phytologist Trust which owns
the New Phytologist.

When we all published journals only on paper, for a society to change
publisher was a relatively simple matter. However, the advent of
electronic editions has raised many issues to complicate the process. For
example: What rights would the society grant to the prior publisher to
allow online access to issues published during its tenure? How will the
expense of providing this ongoing access be covered? Would the new
publisher want to mount the prior volumes which it had not published? Are
the files from the prior publisher compatible with the new publisher's
online system? These are issues which did not exist when many current
publishing agreements were written years ago but which we must now address
both with the proprietors of our existing journals and with those who are
placing their journals with us.

How the online transition is done varies with each proprietor. The New
Phytologist Trust asked us to take down the Cambridge Journals Online
edition of the New Phytologist and provide the electronic files to
Blackwell, which we have done. The Protein Society allowed us to keep
Protein Science mounted on Cambridge Journals Online while they arranged
for the mounting of the prior volumes.  We are awaiting sample files for
evaluation from another publisher for a society journal which we will
begin to publish in 2002.

The questions raised by Kimberly are important ones and we appreciate the
thoughtful and reasoned approach taken. These are serious issues which are
currently under discussion both within and among publishing houses.  We
look forward to further input from the library community as we continue to
seek viable solutions.

- Conrad Guettler, Journals Director, Cambridge, UK
- Ed Barnas, Journals Manager, New York, NY
Cambridge University Press