Re: American Geophysical Union Electronic options!

[Dennis Dillon <dillon@mail.utexas.edu>]

The University of Texas at Austin has informed all of its Geological
Sciences faculty that we will not be subscribing.

The cost for our 8 print subscriptions is $11,000, the cost for
subscribing to electronic only versions would be more than $36,000 (some
of our geologist have offices more than 5 miles from campus).

We have asked the faculty to be vocal in expressing their displeasure in
the upcoming AGU meetings.

Though it is only speculation, I can't help but wonder whether the impact
factor and value of these journals (relative to their competitors) will
decline as faculty and graduate student access to these journals
diminishes (because of AGU pricing policies).  Our University simply does
not have $36,000 to spend on electronic-only access to 8 journals no
matter how valuable.

--Dennis Dillon
The University of Texas at Austin
__________________

>Re: Chuck's comments on the AGU from before Christmas, the University of
>Utah has subscribed.  Barbara Cox, our Earth Sciences Bibilographer,
>posted the following to Geonet-L on November 27:
>
>"Since libraries have to pay for subscriptions in real dollars, an
>increase of thousands of dollars in one year for a title is not trivial.
>It can be particularly irksome when the announcement is so late in the
>year. However, even at a more than doubled price the Journal of
>Geophysical Research might be a good value. Its ISI impact factor for 2000
>was 6 of 117 in "Geosciences, Interdisplinary".  Its 1999 cost per page
>according to
>http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/atmosphericsci/scholcom/co
>stperpage.html was $0.14, one of the lowest in that list of major
>meteorology journals.  That cost per page doubled would still be well
>below many titles on the list. (Admittedly, a comparison with purely
>geological titles would not be quite so dramatic.) On a per use cost, I
>suspect the online version would be very competitive with many of our
>earth science journals."
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>Margaret Landesman
>University of Utah