Re: Haworth heads-up

[David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

The quality of electronic journal sites, in the customary sense of
functionality and appearance, is certainly important.

But much more important, and a truly critical concern, is reliability.
Especially with the trend towards electronic-only subscriptions, a journal
whose site cannot be accessed is useless. There is no longer any excuse
for a publishers site having less than 100% availability. Many providers
have succeeded in making even complicated system changes in such a way
that at least one of the mirrors remains available. There are both
commercial sites (like ScienceDirect and non-commercial sites (like
HighWire) which appear to have now reached this standard.

In an emergency, when a site does go down, or for those providers whose
sites cannot yet be changed without brief shut-downs, it is necessary to
have a mechanism for informing users who attempt to connect of exactly
what the problem is. An increasing number of providers do inform their
library contacts. Considering that many --or perhaps most--of the users go
to the journals directly or from links, this is not enough; they must
manage to post an appropriate message as well (not their all-purpose
message that usually says "your library does not have a subscription.")

On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Joseph J. Esposito wrote:

> This message prompts me to ask the following:  From a technical point of
> view, not from the point of view of pricing or the granting of rights,
> which academic publishers have the finest Web sites?  To put this
> differently, from the perspective of the academic community, which
> companies should other publishers emulate?  Or to put it differently yet
> again, who in the academic publishing world is the technical equivalent of
> such fail-safe consumer services as Amazon, NetFlix, and Yahoo?  (Which
> may raise another question: Why are consumer Internet services so much
> better than just about all the others?)
>
> And I ask this question because I seek to emulate those companies that the
> customers deem the finest.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Joe Esposito