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Perpetual Access
The concept of perpetual access is a tangled one in the electronic environment. The first thing to consider is that an electronic license generally provides access to all the back electronic issues for the price of one year's license fee. As the years pass, this will become a growing bargain. The extension of the argument that subscribers should have access only to the years they have paid for would imply that the back issues should not be made available unless specifically paid for year by year. I don't think this is a good thing either for scholarship or for the licensees. More importantly, we have to understand that there are presently two kinds of so-called electronic journals, those with a rich set of resource links and those without. Most things passed off as e-journals today are available in page image format (PDF or PS) and do not have links to referencesd and citations and other data. They are simply electronic delivery of page images. Electronic delivery alone does not remove us from the paper paradigm of publishing we are used to. In this case it is clear that the publisher should provide some form of physical product, either included in the price, or at an additional cost. For various reasons outlined in previous messages, it is somewhat impractical to provide access in perpetuity over the network. True e-journals, on the other hand, contain a rich set of links to references and citations, operate a name resolver (to ensure that as the URLs change the links still remain) and include access to non-paper things such as video and other data resources pertinent to the article. These articles are not dead words on a page, put down once and subsequently left alone. They are living entities, updated as often as needed to remain fresh and accessible by the current software and technology. So far, these true e-journals are not very numerous, and are beyond the experience of most librarians. This will change. As an example of a good journal delivered over the WWW see the Astrophysical Journal at http://www/journals/uchicago.edu which has some sample issues available for free. This journal is linked to a freely accessible database of 20 years of abstracts and back issues of most major journals in astronomy, with both backward links (references) and forward links (citations) carried with each article, not to mention access to databases of astronomical information. As new browsing tools become available, the entire corpus of the publicly available electronic journal can be rederived from the richly tagged archival copy maintained by the publisher. In this way, we added the HTML tabes format to the Astrophysical Journal retrospectively. We have a journal which has to be maintained on a regular basis. But more than that, we have a journal in which the links make up a substantial portion of the value of the articles. Without the links, the journal drops back to fossilized words on a screen. Libraries should, in this case, have access to what they have paid for -- which is just electronic delivery of page images. On the other hand, a living, vibrant, linked e-journal is a different creature and requires a different approach. Here the linked back issues are, in fact, a reqired part of the e-journal. Since the total base of knowledge is distributed over many providers, the access has to be made through the WWW. In this totally distributed scenario, it makes no sense, from the standpoint of scholarly use, to talk about licensing individual years. The real problem is not perpetual access, but rather, how to ensure that the complete archive of the interlinked literature remains accessible. We have begun to solve this problem in the world-wide astronomical community -- which is a compact community whith only a few major journals. Now it is up to the other communities to work toward the same sort of combined and interlinked information resource which is proving to be a tremendous tool in the conduct of new research in astronomy. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Some of my publications on a new vision for electronic scholarly publishing can be found at http://www.aas.org/~pboyce/epubs. ____________________________________________________________________ Dr. Peter B. Boyce Senior Associate and past Executive Officer pboyce@aas.org American Astronomical Society Fax: 202-234-2560 http://www.aas.org/~pboyce Ph: 202-328-2010 ____________________________________________________________________ Peter B. Boyce ________________________________________________________________________ Senior Associate and past Executive Officer pboyce@aas.org American Astronomical Society Phone: 202 328-2010 2000 Florida Ave. #400, Washington, DC 20009 FAX: 202-234-2560 http://www.aas.org/~pboyce
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