A Commitment to Electronic Archiving - how Elsevier ensure that you'llloose 5 years of back files -- unless you sign the "big deal"

[kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de]

"Permanent archiving of electronic information and assured access to those
archives are essential in scholarly information. Elsevier Science is
committed to maintaining an active electronic archive of its journals and
to providing access to that archive to all subscribers"

					 new-elsevier@elsevier.com
				(2001 Subscription Price List, p.6)

Dear Colleagues,

Subscribers to journals in the Elsevier Science Portal "Nuclear Physics
Electronic" have received a message from Elsevier Science announcing the
end of unconditional access to the archives of these journals for
institutional print subscribers (see below). Only content of 1995 and
earlier will (for some time) remain accessible on the Elsevier Server
until those back files become available via ScienceDirect.

For content published after 1995, longtime print subscribers that may have
invested about 40,000 USD per year for the 9 journals that are part of the
platform, are suddenly denied access to 5 years of those archives that
were formerly included with their print subscriptions.

What remains, are the usually 12 months "free" access included with all
Elsevier print subscriptions through the web editions program. If a
scientist tries to access earlier issues, he is shown only the abstract
and asked to check whether his institution has signed up to ScienceDirect.

The announcement by Elsevier Science marks the sad end of an aera of
former longtime archival access for physics journals on Elsevier. Last
year already saw the same transformation of suddenly disappearing archives
into link collections to ScienceDirect silently going on for the 15
journals on the Elsevier Science Portal "Surfaces and Interfaces", for the
2 journals on Chemical Physics Physical Chemistry Online CPC Online
(Chemical Physics and Chemical Physics Letters) and for the 18 journals in
Elsevier's "Condensed Matter Web", and for numerous individual journal
titles that formerly provided electronic access to several years of back
files via the Elsevier Science Website, like Earth and Planetary Science
Letters or Computer Physics Communications. Access to all those back files
has been shut down for all but ScienceDirect Digital Collections
Subscribers.

For the publisher it's just streamlining its operations and luring even
more subscribers into its ScienceDirect "Freedom Collection". However, we
and our scientists as longtime subscribers to these journals feel deceived
and are not willing to accept this publisher's actions without a word of
protest.

As our library, after 4 years of managing to sustain our subscriptions,
again faces a severe cut in our acquisitions budget (almost 500,000 EUR or
ca. 28% of our serials budget), we are now planning to cancel most if not
all of our Elsevier Subscriptions with the end of 2002 to free up the
necessary funds needed to continue our other subscriptions, especially to
journals by well-known learned societies. Only after a comprehensive
faculty evaluation of our present journal holdings as a whole (including
consideration of titles to be added to our collections) will we reconsider
which Elsevier journals have enough demand to warrant resubscribing
despite their high price tags and which other journals can be cancelled
instead.

After being confronted with a sample of statistical data on cost per use
for Elsevier journals vs. society journals and on learning that they would
not loose any long-time archival access to formerly subscribed journals
because Elsevier Science has already cut back access to those archives,
our university's library advisory board unanimously decided to back up the
library's proposal for a politically motivated "emergency decision" to
cancel our Elsevier subscriptions. At the same time, we'll encourage
faculty to publish in not-for-profit society and open access journals and
to follow a consequent strategy to self-archive their refereed journal
articles in open electronic archives. Stuttgart University library is a
signatory to the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

Bernd-Christoph Kaemper
Subject Specialist for Physics and Electronic Resources Librarian,
Stuttgart University Library, P.O. Box 104941, 70043 Stuttgart, Germany
Tel +49 711 685-4780, Fax +49 711 685-3502, kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Access to Nuclear Physics Electronic
Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 04:49:48 -0500
From: Nuclear Physics Electronic <listman-e2-273274@ProcessRequest.com>
To: <kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de>

Dear MrKaemper,

Nuclear Physics Electronic (NPE) at:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/npe  will have a new access model
for articles published after 1995. Access to articles published
before 1995 will not yet change.

What has changed?
========================

There is no longer any need to register in two places with Elsevier
Science. If your institute subscribes to the Nuclear Physics Electronic
titles on ScienceDirect, you will have seamless access to the full text
(in HTML and PDF) from Nuclear Physics Electronic.

This means that access based on your personal reader key or on your
"electronic access" license is no longer valid.

Access via ScienceDirect
========================

Online access to full text articles in Nuclear Physics Electronic will be
available to those readers whose library is:

1. Subscribed to the Elsevier Science web database ScienceDirect OR
2. Registered with ScienceDirect Web editions and holds a
   subscription to the print version of the journal(s) in
   Nuclear Physics Electronic.


What if you experience problems accessing the full text via Nuclear
Physics Electronic:

=================================================================

This may be because your library does not hold a subscription to the print
version of this journal or because your librarian's registration to
ScienceDirect Web Editions is still being processed.

Registering for ScienceDirect Web Editions is done using the License
Agreement at http://www.sciencedirect.com/web-editions (via your
librarian).

Please feel free to contact us if you require additional
information regarding these access changes.

Yours sincerely,

Carl Schwarz
Senior Publishing Editor
mailto:npe@elsevier.com