ALPSP Library Survey on Self-archiving and Journal Cancellation

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 12:29:16 +0000
From: Leslie Carr <lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: Mark Ware <subs@MARKWARECONSULTING.COM>
Cc: "Sally Morris (ALPSP)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>, LIS-ELIB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK,
      Brown M.L. <M.L.Brown@soton.ac.uk>,
      Bill Hubbard <Bill.Hubbard@nottingham.ac.uk>,
      Alma Swan <a.swan@talk21.com>, Derek Law <d.law@strath.ac.uk>,
      Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: ALPSP library survey

Your "ALPSP Library Survey on Self-archiving and Journal Cancellation" 
looks very interesting, and I look forward to the information that it will 
bring out. (However, if librarians are only a part of the cancellation 
process, I hope that the questionnaire will be addressed to the academics 
and others who also share responsibility for these decisions.)

I have an important question about the structure of the questionnaire. 
Pages 2, 3, 4, 6 are qualified by statements "If you think X is a 
cancellation factor..." whereas the delayed access embargo question (page 
5) has no such qualification (how short does an embargo have to be before 
you feel that a separate subscription is unnecessary). Embargoes are a 
contentious part of the Open Access landscape at the moment, so it is 
unfortunate that the questionnaire in its current form is simply begging 
the question it is apparently attempting to answer.

Also, the key Open Access question (Q19 If you do NOT consider the 
immediate free availability of content on open access archives a good 
reason in itself to cancel a journal, why not?) may be accidentally 
skipped over, due to the respondents' experience from pages 2 & 3 of 
skipping to the next page to find the next relevant question. Certainly, I 
missed out those crucial questions on my first run through the 
questionnaire, and I was looking for them! Perhaps you could simply add 
the further instruction "if not, proceed to question 19 *at the bottom of 
this page*" at the top of the page. --- Les Carr

On 9 Jan 2006, at 10:03, Mark Ware wrote:

> Dear Librarian
>
> ALPSP (the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, 
> www.alpsp.org) would like your kind assistance with a survey addressing 
> the possible impact of pre-print archives on journals.
>
> As you may be aware, some publishers are becoming concerned that if 
> self-archiving of postprints, or even preprints, of journal articles 
> becomes sufficiently widespread, this may lead to a decline in usage at 
> journals' own websites, and that this in turn may lead to cancellations. 
> In order to understand whether or not our fears are well-founded, we 
> would like to understand more about the process by which you make the 
> decision to cancel journals, what the crucial factors are, and how you 
> would rank them in importance, both now and in the future.
>
> We would be extremely grateful if you could spare a little time to 
> complete this survey to help us reach a better understanding of the 
> situation. We shall make the aggregated results of the survey publicly 
> available as a contribution to this debate. (Individual responses will 
> of course remain anonymous.) To complete the survey, please click on 
> this link:
>
> http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=960811615855
>
> Thank you in advance for your help with this.
>
> Regards
>  -Mark Ware (on behalf of ALPSP)
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Mark Ware Consulting Ltd
> T:  +44 (0)117 959 3726
> E:  mark@markwareconsulting.com
> W: www.markwareconsulting.com