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Re: Perpetual Access 

David Carlson wrote:

>Peter Boyce, Pete Goldie and others have expressed their opinions recently
>on the distinction between "true" electronic journals and the facsimile
>representation of pages, such as that provided by the Adobe Acrobat PDF
>...
>
>This perspective comes from such characterizations as "true electronic
>journals" (versus the false ones, I assume) and that other representations
>are "SIMPLY electronic delivery of page images" (my emphasis). Mr. Goldie
>warns of "short-term expeditious e-pub solutions." I agree with the
>distinctions that have been made between these different type of
>representations, but I think PDF type resources provide -- and will
>continue to provide -- a very useful base of communication and format.

I think that THE distinction ought to rest on whether the 'journal' makes
an electronic version the primary and print copy secondary or vice versa. 
Astrophysical Journal is one that I would label 'true electronic', but
would claim that their pdf format is not an ideal electronic version (two
column page format, no hyperlinks) while the html version is GREAT!!!!! 
There is no technological reason that the pdf version can not offer all
the same advantages of hyperlinks, etc. that the html version does. 

PDF format is not limiting as some may infer from the discussions, nor may
infer from the pdf version of AJ.  PDF can have links, embedded movies,
etc.  An example would be
http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eprints/mic/papers/9704/9704001.abs ('The Future
Information Structure in Economics')  where you can find tex, ps, pdf, and
html formats of the paper (published this month in the Journal of Economic
Perspectives). The pdf version is linked as is the html version. 

Third, as with print journals, some electronic journals will do more and
some will do less.  Some will have hyper links to extant literature and
some will not.  I hope that like Astrophysical Journal, things would be
hyper linked but what matters (at least to me) is that the delivery of the
material is via the net - regardless.  I would prefer pdf or html or ps so
that the body can be text searched versus the JSTOR page image delivery
but far better to have the (JSTOR)  page image than none at all. 

But Peter Boyce certainly can make that case better than I.  See
http://www.aas.org/Epubs/webinfo/papers.htm for many papers. 

I only wish that my profession (economics) would go the way that AJ has. 

Bob

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