Electronic journals and their management
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040671 |
| Date | 01 January 1998 |
| Pages | 3-5 |
| Published date | 01 January 1998 |
| Author | Fytton Rowland |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Electronic journals
and their management
Fytton Rowland, Director of
Undergraduate Programmes, and
Programme Tutor, BA(hons)
programme in Publishing, Department
of Information Science, Loughborough
University
The papers in this issue and the next issue of
Vine
(110 and 111) are concerned with the impact of
electronic
journals,
and fall into two main groups:
those from libraries, and those from publishers.
There is no paper from a purely commercial
publisher, and one of the "library" papers is in fact
from the managing agents of the NESLI pro-
gramme, who negotiate on behalf of libraries.
Despite these caveats, the groupings do make clear
the difference in position that exists between those
who look at electronic information services from
the viewpoint of the librarian (as surrogate for the
end user), and those who look at them from the
viewpoint of the supplier. The hybrid case is
perhaps Tom Wilson, a supplier in this case, but
very much on the side of the academic rather than
the publisher, and putting the case for the free
electronic journal.
The library contributions, from several countries,
all identify very clearly the key problems con-
cerned with the provision of electronic journals in
academic and special libraries. The problems of
licence terms, especially as they apply to multi-
campus institutions, staff and students working
from home, and multi-campus institutions, pre-
occupy most of the authors. Different publishers
have so far insisted on different approaches. Some
require password control, some control by IP
address. Some publishers define "site licence"
very strictly, so that a university with several
campuses within the same city cannot count as one
site.
Some universities now have distance learn-
ers all around the world, so that their Internet
addresses are not even in the same country as the
campus. Many academics now have Internet
access at home, but there is wariness on publish-
ers'
part about allowing access within the site
licence from non-academic Internet addresses.
The technical implications of these licence terms
lie in IP address verification, password control,
and local mounting of databases. In the UK
context, the use of the Athens system for password
control - allowing the user to have just one pass-
word covering all the services that use Athens,
wherever the user is logging in from - seems to
provide the best solution from the library's and the
user's points of view. Farmakis et al. from Greece
describe a formalised computer system, imple-
mented at their institution, for managing access
by different categories of user to different publish-
ers'
offerings, to cope with the varying licence
requirements. Though ingenious, this system has
clearly required considerable investment on the
customer's part: should suppliers be acting in such
a way as to necessitate such major work by the
customer?
The point is repeatedly made that users do not
care,
and may not know, which publisher produces
which journal, and therefore systems that allow
searching of the journals of many-ideally all-
publishers from a single interface represent the
preferred arrangement. It is not clear how the
competition between aggregators, and indeed the
refusal of some publishers to allow access to
aggregators at all, can be reconciled with this
requirement of
users.
All the major subscription
agents, and several other organisations such as
OCLC and ingenta are offering aggregation serv-
ices but these are of limited value if they all offer
different, partially overlapping incomplete sets of
journals running across many subject fields.
Either a genuinely comprehensive "one-stop shop",
which NESLI may possibly achieve, or access via
subject gateways would seem more likely to be
valued by the end user. A cautionary note comes
from Heather Dawson, writing about the
SuperJournal project from the British Library of
Political and Economic Science at the London
School of
Economics.
Usage of the political
science cluster of electronic journals has been
relatively low, with only a quarter of users return-
ing to use the cluster for a second time within a
year. Lack of a critical mass of titles seems to be
the main issue, even though several publishers'
products are included in the cluster. On a more
upbeat note, though, Edwards describes an effec-
tive (and apparently trouble-free) collaboration
between higher education, further education and
public libraries to provide good access to elec-
tronic information sources to people throughout
the city of Sunderland.
VINE
110
— 3
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