SciTech Library Question

.: Those who follow this humble blog are aware that I have been on a mission of sorts regarding ICIS and its publication, Chemical Market Reporter (CMR), which became ICIS Chemical Business Americas (ICBA) in September 2006. My rants posts included rants coverage about the removal of weekly chemical prices from the print edition of CMR in 2005, and then the sudden and unannounced end of CMR during the first week of September 2006, and the appearance a week later of its replacement, ICBA, complete with 80% of the chemical prices permanently removed from its weekly listing. I last reported that I had received a very positive response to my rants concerns from Penny Wilson, the ICIS Global Editorial Director, who reaffirmed ICIS's commitment to its student readers. Subsquent to Penny's first response, she forwarded a number of suggestions for what ICIS could provide on its website to be of use to students. These included:

1. Create a holding tank for company price announcements. In this way students will get a lot more than from the slimmed down list currently offered on the ICBA site. The latter is provided by ICIS pricing and updated regularly, but it is not enough for students themselves. The prices we offered on the old CMR site were a big attraction to students, even though they were out of date and very rarely updated by CMR which didn't have the resources to do so.

2. Create a kind of "my space" for student blogs and forums - it will be global and allow students to swap information and discussions, tips and anything else they'd like to swap across many oceans, or just locally. It needs to be self-governed in some way. Undoubtedly it would provide us with good fodder to follow in our own content, as well as helping us take the temperature of students' needs/wants/thoughts etc.....

3. Create a holding tank for interesting student papers so they can be shared and aired. Academic papers could also be accommondated. A kind of "think-tank" environment.

4. Create a space for employers to market their companies to the next generation of employees - no job ads of course, but they could talk about the career development and post grad training opportunities they offer.

5. Create a space/holding tank for press releases. This would allow students to keep up with the news of the day (however biased) and also help them get a handle on vital industry information.

Welcome to the first phase of our service to students. We intend to develop this area into an entire Knowledge Zone, with information designed to help students with their studies and to equip tutors with some teaching tools. We hope it will turn into a space in which students and academics worldwide can communicate and discuss issues with each other, and showcase their best work to the wider world, not least potential employers.

So kudos to Penny Wilson, Sue Royse, and the ICIS staff for not simply giving my concerns lip-service, but actually walking the walk. Penny and Sue plan to consult with a number of chemisty and chemical/materials engineering librarians and faculty in the coming months, to improve the site and make it as useful to students as possible. What's refreshing to me is that this is a rare example of a publisher - a trade publisher no less! - responding sincerely and to the needs of a very small percentage of their readership - students, who are their future customers.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

.: From an recent e-mail:

Dear Colleagues,

IEEE signs archiving agreement with Portico

Portico is pleased to announce the signing of an agreement with IEEE to preserve the organization’s periodicals and conference proceedings. The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology. The international association produces nearly one-third of the world's literature in the fields of electrical and electronics engineering and computer science, as well as develops more than 900 active industry standards. IEEE serves engineers, scientists and other professionals in 160 countries and has more than 365,000 members worldwide.

Through this agreement with Portico, IEEE has committed 137 periodicals ( journals, transactions, magazines, newsletters ) and 163 conference proceedings for long term preservation, thus ensuring its publications will be available to future generations of scholars, practitioners, researchers and students.

In addition to supplying content, IEEE has agreed to make an annual financial contribution to Portico.

With the inclusion of IEEE publications, over 6,000 titles have now been entrusted to the Portico archive. The complete list of journal titles is available at http://www.portico.org/about/committed_titles_alpha.html and a list of participating publishers is available at http://www.portico.org/about/part_publishers.html.

Continue reading "IEEE Signs Archiving Agreement With Portico" »

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I always hope for the best but it has been my experience that many of Wiley's policies and pricing decisions appear to be detrimental to libraries. The recent article by the Bergstrom & Bergstrom, while discussing commercial publishers in general, very aptly describes what seems to be Wiley's business model ...

"Over the past decade, scientific publishing has shifted from a paper-based distribution system to one largely built upon electronic access to journal articles. Despite this shift, the basic patterns of journal pricing have remained largely unchanged. The large commercial publishers charge dramatically higher prices to institutions than do professional societies and university presses. These price differences do not reflect differences in quality as measured by citation rate."

http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/publications/BergstromAndBergstrom06.pdf

Two of the best examples of this are:

Inorganica Chimica Acta (Elsevier) has a 2005 price per page of $1.88 ($8633/4588), an ISI Impact Factor of 1.61 and a p/p/IF of 1.17. Inorganic Chemistry (ACS) has a 2005 price per page of $0.26 ($2604/9977), an ISI Impact Factor of 3.85 and a p/p/IF of 0.07.

Thus, Inorganica Chimica Acta is 7 times more expensive per page ($1.88/$0.26) and is nearly 17 times (1.17/0.07) less cost-effective than Inorganic Chemistry.

Biopolymers/Peptide Science (Wiley) has a 2005 price/page of $3.70 ($6995/1893), an ISI Impact Factor of 2.55 and a p/p/IF of 1.45. Biomacromolecules (ACS) has a 2005 price/page of $0.26 ($905/3485), an ISI Impact Factor of 3.62 and a p/p/IF of 0.07.

Thus, Biopolymers/Peptide Science is 14 times more expensive per page ($3.70/$0.26) and is nearly 21 times (1.45/.07) less cost-effective than Biomacromolecules.

Henry Barschall (Physics Today, July 1998, p.56) defined the ratio of the price/printed character to the frequency with which articles in the journal are cited as the best indicator of a journal's cost-effectiveness. I have modified this slightly to the more easily determined ratio of the price/page to the ISI Impact Factor. Thus, in the examples above, the smaller the ratio the greater the journal's cost-effectiveness.

I think you will agree that these disparities can not continue indefinitely. It is sad but true that many of the very expensive journals are in a death spiral of cancellations, and are only surviving because of a few institutional subscriptions. Their excessive subscription cost not only penalizes the remaining subscribing libraries, which could be using these funds for other publications or services, but also insures that these articles will be largely unavailable to their target audience.

Posted by Dana Roth at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

.: From the press release:

Hoboken, N.J. and Oxford U.K., November 17, 2006— John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE:JWa) (NYSE:JWb) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the outstanding shares of Blackwell Publishing (Holdings) Ltd., one of the world's foremost academic and professional publishers. The purchase price of £572 million will be financed with a combination of debt and cash. The transaction will be implemented through a U.K. Scheme of Arrangement. Wiley has received irrevocable commitments from the principal shareholders of Blackwell Publishing to sell their shares to Wiley. The companies anticipate that the transaction will close early in 2007.

Based in Oxford, Blackwell Publishing's revenue in 2005 was approximately £210 million, or $380 million, which is about the same as Wiley's global Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) business. Blackwell's publishing programs include journals, books and online content in the sciences, technology, medicine, the social sciences and humanities. Blackwell Ltd., the book library service and retailing business, is a separate entity and is not part of the acquisition.

Continue reading "Wiley to Acquire Blackwell Publishing (Holdings) Ltd." »

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

.: In response to my criticisms and concerns about the changes to Chemical Market Reporter, and the sudden albeit temporary disappearance of its web site (with the chemical prices!) during the first week of classes, Mr Joseph Chang, editor of ICIS Chemical Business Americas has written the following letter, which is printed here in its entirety, and without comment from me. I had a friendly and productive discussion with Joe on the phone earlier this week, and offered him the chance to respond here if he wished to do so. I really appreciate that he took the time to do so, and note that he is receptive to our concerns. Thank you, Joe.

Letter from Joseph Chang, the Editor of ICIS Chemical Business Americas

I want to offer my sincerest apologies for the great inconvenience the revision of our online price pages has caused. We truly value the academic community and our educational subscribers and we are eager to continue a fruitful dialogue.

Let me explain the rationale behind the changes in our pricing section: Over the years, our magazine has shifted towards more news and analysis, and although prices are an important aspect of our product, they are our editors’ primary focus. As a result, many of the entries in the pricing section had not been updated for years, making them irrelevant or worse.

To correct the problem, we significantly narrowed the list of chemicals in the pricing section to those we can update on a regular basis. The entries that currently appear consist of 95 chemical prices: 28 commodity chemicals and 67 oils, fats and waxes. These are the prices we are comfortable posting, because we can ensure that they are relatively up-to-date.

We would rather put up a limited price list that is meaningful than a large price list that is suspect. That said, I understand that you would have been better served by some advance notice of the changes we planned, and I regret our failure to provide it.

As Randy Reichardt correctly observes, the students you teach are the future of our industry. We fully recognize this and aim to better serve you needs and interests.

I sincerely hope you and your students find value in our publication ICIS Chemical Business Americas, even with the narrowed—but more accurate--chemical pricing section. We also offer important news, as well as analysis and insights on major trends in the global chemical industry. As you guide your students onto their future paths, I can only hope that they make our publication a key part of their journey.

I welcome any of your comments and questions. Please feel free to contact me at 212-791-4224, or joseph.chang@icis.com

Joseph Chang, Editor, ICIS Chemical Business Americas

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

.: I.: I don't know where to begin this time. I'm trying hard to contain my anger. Last week I reported that ICIS brought down the Chemical Market Reporter site, virtually at the same time I was teaching a class of 155 chemical engineering students on, among other things, how to search CMR to find current chemical prices, a major component of one of their assignments. What I didn't realize was that ICIS had brought down the CMR site, and was redesigning it to become ICIS Chemical Business Americas. After learning about this the day after my instruction, the professor and I scrambled to get an explanation to all 155 students; we sent them a note advising that the new site would be up today (Monday 11 Sept 2006). I had hopes that the new site would at the very least return access to the full list of chemical prices. This did not happen.

Instead, in yet another example of a trade publisher's apparent disregard of its educational subscribers (which would include thousands of students studying to become engineers and needing access to these prices for their design courses), ICIS no longer is reporting most of the prices it previously reported on a weekly basis, with the following explanation:

These are chemical price indications based on pricing information obtained from market participants. Posted prices are updated on a periodic basis and do not necessarily represent levels at which transactions may have actually occurred, nor do they represent bid or ask prices. Price ranges, indicated by the two columns, may represent quotations from different participants, as well as differences in quantity, quality and location. Although prices are reported as accurately as possible, they do not carry any guarantees. The prices are intended as a guide for ICIS Chemical Business Americas readers and not to be used as a basis for negotiations between producers and customers.

The volume of prices has been narrowed significantly to those which can be updated on a regular basis. If you have any questions, please contact Editor Joseph Chang at 212-791-4224 or joseph.chang@icis.com , or CSC at 888-525-3255 or csc@icis.com .

I checked the Chemical Prices P-S for the week of 28 August - 3 Sept 2006, and counted 209 prices. For the period of 11-17 September 2006, Chemical Prices for the letters P, Q, R, and S total 36 prices, or an 82.% decrease in the typical number of prices previously reported in this alphabetic range.

What is it about trade publishers and their apparent disregard for their educational customers? I know, it's all about the almighty dollar, but good grief - what part of "we’re teaching your future customers” doesn’t resonate in the commercial world?

It doesn't matter that I have a bit of egg on my face from having taught 155 chemical engineering students how to search a site that no longer existed while I was actually teaching them. But there's a larger rub that really angers me.

As documented earlier, ICIS removed the chemical prices from the print edition of CMR in April 2005, moved the prices online, and decided to charge something in the vicinity of US$10,000 to access the prices online. After I and others raised hell about that option, Brian Gray reported that he had negotiated with CMR to allow educational institutions access to the most recent twelve months of chemical prices online, at US$415 - something for which we had paid in our print subscriptions in the first place! Later it was confirmed that unlimited access would cost us US$715! So for any of us in universities, colleges, etc., to provide access to the archived weekly chemical prices, we needed to ante up another few hundred dollars for a service that we had received as part of existing subscriptions for decades. Did I mention that these chemical prices are at times critical to an undergraduate chemical engineering student's education?

Now, said unlimited access gives us much less from Sept 2006 onwards. As such, college and university libraries supporting programs in chemical engineering and the chemical industry will need to decide whether or not to continue to pay an inflated subscription price for access to an online product, once extremely critical to undergraduate chemical engineers' education, or to cancel and look for the same information elsewhere.

Perhaps the writing is on the wall, and I'm too dumb to process it: for commercial and trade publishers, maybe future customers don't count until they actually exist.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

.: As if the timing couldn't be worse, in a move that further confirms how sadly out-of-touch trade publishers are with their educational customers, the Powers That Be at ICIS have dumped Chemical Market Reporter, and are launching a new title in its place, called ICIS Chemical Business Americas. Apparently it will be available next week. Meanwhile, when you visit the CMR page (the number one site for chemical prices) or ICBA sites, it says is "coming soon."

Dumb question: Could ICIS have done this at any time other than the beginning of fall semester at universities and colleges all over the freakin' planet? Perhaps. Yesterday morning I was extolling the virtues of CMR to 155 students in Chemical & Materials Engineering 200, using previously-designed screen shots to show them how to search for and find a chemical price. Oddly enough, each of them must find a price of a chemical in order to complete an assignment distributed to them yesterday in the class! I learned that CMR wasn't working when I received an e-mail from a distraught CME 200 student this afternoon. The last time I checked the site (a few days ago), it was working fine.

In the spring of 2005, after learning that CMR had dumped the chemical prices from the print version, and was charging something outrageous like ~US$10,000 to access the same information online, I led the charge to have the prices reinstated, or at least made available to educational subscribers at a considerably reduced rate. Read all the posts here if you like. Now ICIS pulls this stunt at the exact same time tens of thousands of chemical engineering, chemistry, business, and who knows what other categories of students are beginning classes, and need access to chemical prices ASAP.

Amazing, astonishing, but I am not surprised. I remember hearing that educational subscribers constitute perhaps 5-7% of CMR subscriptions, and I would expect the same percentage would apply to most trade titles in engineering and related disciplines. Trade publishers cater to their industries, and why not? The for-profit subscribers are their bread and butter. But what trade publishers tend to forget is that those of us at educational locations who subscribe to their publications are also teaching THEIR FUTURE CUSTOMERS. At this point in time, I seriously doubt such a concept has any resonance with them whatsoever, otherwise by now we would have seem some evidence to the contrary.

Sure, the new site might be up on Monday of next week, but even if it is, those of us who subscribe to CMR - er - ICBA, will need to reconfigure our tips sheets, resource guides, catalogue entries, etc etc. Like we have nothing else to do when classes begin. Never mind the additional embarrassment of having taught students in large groups, only to discover the site to which we were referencing has gone buh-bye. I guess it serves me right for using screen shots instead of going live during my presentation...

To put it mildly: ARGH!!! Idiot publishers. That sound you hear is my head banging against my desk.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

.: One of the consequences of working two jobs at the same time is that my inbox is growing faster than I can hit the delete button. Here are a few recent items from the Knowledgespeak news archive, which I have been meaning to post for some time:

• BioMed Central unveils new online open access journal - "Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced the launch of Biology Direct, a new online open access journal with a new peer review system. Led by Editors-in-Chief David J Lipman, Director of the National Center Biotechnology Information (NCBI); Eugene V Koonin, Senior Investigator at NCBI; and Laura Landweber, Associate Professor at Princeton University, the journal seeks to provide authors and readers with a unique system of peer review.

  The journal will cover original research articles, hypotheses and reviews, and is available online at www.biology-direct.com. The journal includes publications in the fields of Systems Biology, Computational Biology and Evolutionary Biology, to be soon followed by an Immunology section..."

Continue reading "Knowledgespeak Updates" »

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hindawi Publishing Corp. publishes a dozen Open Access journals, 10 of which are directly applicable to engineering.

• Differential Equations and Nonlinear Mechanics - Forthcoming 2005; Print ISSN: 1687-4099 | Online ISSN: 1687-4102.
  
• EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing - Forthcoming 2006; Print ISSN: 1687-4714 | Online ISSN: 1687-4722.
  
• EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology - Forthcoming 2006; Print ISSN: 1687-4145 | Online ISSN: 1687-4153.
  
• EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems - Forthcoming 2006; Print ISSN: 1687-3955 | Online ISSN: 1687-3963.
  
• EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking - Fulltext 2004+; Print ISSN: 1687-1472 | Online ISSN: 1687-1499.
  
• International Journal of Biomedical Imaging - Fulltext 2005+; Print ISSN: 1687-4188 | Online ISSN: 1687-4196.
  
• International Journal of Rotating Machinery - Fulltext v8+ (2002+); Print ISSN: 1023-621X | Online ISSN: 1542-3034.
  
• Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology - Fulltext v1-2 (2001-2002), 2003+; Print ISSN: 1110-7243 | Online ISSN: 1110-7251. [Volume numbering pattern change]
  
• Journal of Nanomaterials - Forthcoming 2006; Print ISSN: 1687-4110 | Online ISSN: 1687-4129.
  
• Mathematical Problems in Engineering - Fulltext v1-8 (1995-2002), 2003+; Print ISSN: 1024-123X | Online ISSN: 1563-5147. [Volume numbering pattern change]

Posted by George Porter at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As commercial STM publishers continue to increase the subscription prices of their journals, and charge for backfile access, is it time for them to consider offering open access to their archives? Dana Roth of the Millikan Library at Caltech considers the benefits and consequences of such a move in this commentary:

Open Access Archives and STM Publishers - A Commentary by Dana Roth

One wonders ...

One wonders when commercial publishers might re-think their marketing strategies and recognize that their library subscribers deserve some compensation for years of annual price increases that far exceed inflation (for either CPI or pagination). The cumulative effect of decades of these often questionable price increases is exemplified by an analysis of the 2004 subscription costs, pagination, and cost/page.

Factoring in the ISI Impact Factors (IP) and normalization of the cost/page/IP values for each commercial journal against the Journal of the Electrochemical Society (JES) produces some very startling results. These normalized values (2004N$/p/IP) are possibly a measure of the cost-effectiveness of each journal compared with JES.

While the Electrochemical Society's JES is somewhat unique in its very reasonable cost/page, they are certainly not publishing this journal at a loss. The normalized values of the 2004 cost/page/IP indicate that the J. Electrochem. Soc. is more cost effective than the J. Applied Electrochem. by a factor of 32. Alternatively, looking simply at the difference in the $cost/page data suggests that, if published by a society, J. Electroanal. Chem. could be priced at $512/year instead of $9649.

Given these presumably handsome profits, would it be unreasonable to suggest that commercial publishers consider making their online archives freely available thru an equivalent of PubMed Central?

One can only imagine the enormous positive public relations that the first commercial publisher will receive for this small token of appreciation to the library and research community ... and that this might encourage others to follow suit. This would also have the beneficial effect of freeing up funds for the learned society journal back files, which when their capital costs are met could also be made freely available. Thus, with a little publisher cooperation, an Open Access environment for virtually all journal articles published more than ten years ago would be a reality.

P.S. Publishers should also strongly consider offering RSS feeds, and MARC records for new online books in addition to currently offered e-mail announcements.

Dana L. Roth
Millikan Library / Caltech 1-32
1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125
626-395-6423 fax 626-792-7540
dzrlib AT ibrary.caltech.edu
http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

.: Roddy MacLeod sent word today about Inderscience, a publishing company based in Switzerland:

Inderscience is a publisher of high quality peer-reviewed international journals in the fields of engineering and technology, management and business administration, and energy, environment and sustainable development.Roddy advises that Inderscience publishes journals in the following areas: Engineering, Computing/ICT and Technology; Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development; Management and Business Administration; Healthcare, Sport and Leisure, and by 2006, will be publishing 170 titles.

Of interest is Inderscience's flexible subscription plans. Libraries can negotiate subscription prices based on estimated number of concurrent users per title. TOC e-mail alerts and an RSS feed for new articles are also available.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: As noted by George Porter, "The OECD has posted its report on Scientific Publishing and an accompanying press release." The Economist offered a commentary today as well, in a piece called The Paperless Library:

Free access to scientific results is changing research practices

IT USED to be so straightforward. A team of researchers working together in the laboratory would submit the results of their research to a journal. A journal editor would then remove the authors' names and affiliations from the paper and send it to their peers for review. Depending on the comments received, the editor would accept the paper for publication or decline it. Copyright rested with the journal publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribe to the journal.

No longer. The internet—and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it—is making free access to scientific results a reality. This week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued a report describing the far-reaching consequences of this. The report, by John Houghton of Victoria University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the OECD, makes heavy reading for publishers who have, so far, made handsome profits. But it goes further than that. It signals a change in what has, until now, been a key element of scientific endeavour.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

.: The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has launched two new journals within the last month, ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG) and ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN).

ACM Transaction on Algorithms is the long-awaited result of a mass resignation by the editorial board of Journal of Algorithms (JoA) over a long running pricing dispute with their publisher. [For additional background on the JoA->TALG story, read the STLQ posts Commentary: The Crisis In Scholary Communication, by George Porter and Journal of Algorithms Fallout Getting Noticed, Stanford U Takes Stand Against "Pricey Journals".]

ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
Fulltext v1+ (2005+)
http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=J982
Print ISSN: 1549-6333 | Online ISSN: 1549-6325

ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN)
Fulltext v1+ (2005+)
http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=J981
ISSN: 1550-4859

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: Knowledgespeak is a new daily online news service covering developments and news from the STM publishing industry. The site also links to relevant articles, white papers, and presentations.

It looks promising, and is a service that is perhaps long overdue for the industry. Visitors can subscribe to the Knowledgespeak newsletter, but astonishingly, there is no RSS feed to the news updates. (Via EngLib)

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 3:57 PM | Permalink

:: Interesting entry from George Porter on the perils of what can happen when an online journal changes publishers in midstream:

Journal of Biomedical Science moved from Karger to Kluwer (now Springer) at the beginning of 2005. Karger provides free access to much of the backfile and provides a link forward to the current website. Springer is not reciprocating, leaving users wondering whether/where the previous years of the journal may lurk on the web.

Journal of Biomedical Science
Fulltext v5-10 (1998-2003); v11 (2004) [subscription required]
Fulltext v12+ (2005+) [subscription required]
Print ISSN: 1021-7770 | Online ISSN: 1423-0127

There's an easily identifiable industry best practice for journals which change publishers, regardless of the contractual issues of what to do with the backfiles.

Best Practice: When an online journal title is transferred from one publisher to another, certain obligations are incumbent upon the former publisher and the current publisher.

The former publisher must acknowledge, from the same URL as previously used to deliver content:

• that they published the journal for a specific period (volumes and years).
  
• where new material may be found by providing a link.
  
• in the event the former publisher no longer provides access to the actual content, what provision has been made (transfer to new publisher, transfer to owning society, etc) for current access to the material which they did publish.

The new publisher must acknowledge, from the same URL used to deliver new/current content:

• the former publisher and the specific period issued from said publisher(s).
  
• where older material may be found by providing a link(s).
  
• in the event the new publisher does not provide access to the actual earlier content, what provision has been made (retention be former publisher, transfer to owning society, etc.) for current access to the earlier material which they did not publish.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 2:10 PM | Permalink

:: While at the SLA trade show, I visited the now booth, i.e., Now Publishers Inc, creators of a new series of journals called Foundations and Trends®. From the Product Overview page:

Each Foundations and Trends� will cover a major branch of a scientific discipline and offer current, state-of-the-art review articles by opinion/research leaders in their field. Authors are allowed 50-100 pages for a complete review of the subject and articles are published upon acceptance in electronic form with all of the references linked to the original source. Each article is intended to put primary research into context, improving researchers' and students' understanding of the original literature. As a result, and guided by the links to source material, users will have access to primary and secondary data - enriching their comprehension, retention and utilization of the content.

now is introducing a new type of product into the research information market. Focusing initially in the Business and Technology areas, now is introducing Foundations and Trends� (FnT). This product combines the peer-review of journals, the high usage of reference works, and the pedagogy of textbooks. Each "issue" of FnT comprises one or more monographs of up to 100 pages written by research and opinion leaders in the field that surveys the literature and offers a state-of-the-art review of the subject in full including a complete bibliography. The issues will be published electronically upon acceptance with subsequent distribution in print format. Each issue will be subject to peer-review thereby vetting the content and validating the information. We will also have authors revise their contribution on a regular basis to maintain currency and the incentives include the long-term citation impact of the article and financial compensation. As the number of "issues" grows over time, the subscriber has access to a large corpus of literature "in effect a "digital library" -- covering the entire scope of a discipline.

Is there a need for this new kind of scholarly publishing? Is a vacuum being filled by now and Morgan & Claypool? Stay tuned to find out.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, a new company in the STM publishing world, has launched its new series of "lectures", Synthesis: The Digital Library of Engineering and Computer Science:

The basic component of the library is a 50- to 100-page "Lecture"; a self-contained electronic document that synthesizes an important research or development topic, authored by an expert contributor to the field. We believe that they offer unique value to the reader by providing more synthesis, analysis, and depth than the typical research journal article. They are also more dynamic and convenient than traditional print or digital handbooks, contributed volumes, and monographs.

The library and its lectures are organized in a hierarchical structure of disciplines and series. Each series is managed by a prominent consulting editor. The series editor guides lecture topic and author selection as well as peer review. New series and lectures will be added continuously and existing lectures will be revised as needed. This will make the collection dynamic in a way that has not been achieved with traditional reference or educational products.

The Synthesis platform provides the user with access to content in both PDF and HTML formats, with live links to references and sophisticated search and personalization functions.

For the moment, the subject emphasis is on electrical and eletronic engineering and computer science topics. I hope the publishers choose to add lectures in the other major engineering fields, including chemical and materials, civil and environmental, mining and petroleum, mechanical, engineering management, and nanotechnology.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: I have been in contact with Connie Magner, Assistant Manager of Subscription Sales for ICIS Publications, publishers of Chemical Market Reporter. Connie advises that CMR will be offering two options to learned/academic institutional subscribers of CMR, to allow for access to the chemical prices. One option, for US$415/year, will provide for unlimited online access to the current issue of CMR every Monday morning plus unlimited search access to a one year online archive (moving wall.) For US$715/yr access will be provided to the full CMR archive, currently 6 years worth of material, including the chemical prices. The rates offered are being offered to the institutions who will maintain their current paper copy subscriptions. Access to the online version of CMR will be provided via IP authentication.

While I lament the loss of the chemical prices in the print edition, I am pleased that CMR has offered an alternative to colleges and universities, to allow access to the very important chemical prices. My sincere thanks to Connie Magner in London, and Helga Tilton, the Editor-in-Chief of CMR in New York, for working towards a solution, which will allow universities and colleges access to the very important weekly chemical prices. My thanks also to Brian Gray at Case Western Reserve for his work towards solving this access dilemma.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

:: As reported by George Porter on a number of discussion groups:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) is a long running (1915+), highly regarded journal [ISI Impact Factor 10.260-10.896 (1999-2003]. PNAS was one of the early collaborators with the National Library of Medicine in the creation of PubMed Central. Backfile digitization has been completed at PubMed Central for PNAS; previously the first 40 or so years of the journal were only available online by subscription through JSTOR.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) Fulltext v1+ (1915+) 6 month moving wall http://pubmedcentral.gov/tocrender.fcgi?journal=2&action=archive
Open Access articles (239, as of 10 May 2005)
http://pubmedcentral.gov/tocrender.fcgi?iid=13407
Fulltext v59+ (1968+) 6 month moving wall http://www.pnas.org/
Fulltext v1-99 (1915-2002) 2 year moving wall; updated annually [subscription required] http://www.jstor.org/journals/00278424.html
Print ISSN: 0027-8424 | Online ISSN: 1091-6490

[Thanks to Carol Myers, PubMed Central Digitization Project, via the PMC-News mailing list <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/pmc-news>.]

George S. Porter

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: From the InfoToday Weekly News Digest:

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. announced the launch of the Analytical Sciences Backfile Collection. This is the latest addition to its growing collection of digitized journal libraries; it is the second one to be launched this year. The Analytical Sciences Backfile Collection is available via Wiley InterScience (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/backfiles), Wiley�s online publishing platform.

Spanning the years 1968 to 1998, the Analytical Sciences Backfile Collection contains digitized back-issue content across 13 journal titles. Subscribers now have access to more than 24,000 research articles and more than 180,000 digitized pages of new analytical sciences content. Articles are presented as fully searchable PDFs, with abstracts, bibliographic content, and literature citations available in HTML, which allows for both internal linking to cited content located on Wiley InterScience and external linking via CrossRef/DOI, PubMed, ISI Web of Science, and CAS.

John Wiley & Sons also announced the launch of two new natural products databases designed for organic and biochemistry research: AntiBase 2005 (for ISIS/Base and ChemFinder) and AmicBase 2005 (on CD-ROM in the following formats: Microsoft Access, CambridgeSoft ChemFinder, and MDL ISIS/Base). AntiBase 2005 is a database of 31,022 natural compounds from microorganisms and higher fungi. The data in AntiBase 2005 has been collected from the primary and secondary literature and then carefully checked and validated. AmicBase 2005 contains information about the antimicrobial and toxicological properties of pharmaceutical drugs and natural compounds produced through microorganisms and higher plants.
Source: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: As reported in CHMINF-L by David Flaxbart:

Has anyone noticed the significant changes in Chemical Market Reporter? As of the March 28 issue, CMR has gone to a slick-magazine format. More importantly, the Chemical Prices section no longer appears. The CMR web site (http://www.chemicalmarketreporter.com/) provides access to this and other information only by registering with a subscription number, then logging in with a username and password. Obviously, this is not a viable solution for library users who have used CMR for years to obtain current chemical pricing information. I see no information on their web site about institutional web subscriptions, either.

CMR has just become much less useful for a library, and the publisher probably did not stop to consider this when redesigning the magazine. It's also unclear how Schnell, the longtime publisher, is related to ICIS, the new publisher.

CMR can be searched on Business Source Premier or ABI Inform. I searched it on BSP, and as expected, no "People and Prices" section is available past the v267 n12 21 March 2005 issue. The quality of the.pdf version of this section, when downloaded from BSP or ABI Inform has been marginable at best, but it was better than nothing, when the print edition might have been hard to track down for our users.

Having to use a subscription number plus ID and PW to access any journal is a useless exercise for libraries. This is an unwelcome development for libraries supporting chemistry and various engineering disciplines such as petroleum refining and chemical engineering. It will make it all the more difficult for students working on capstone projects in engineering design courses to secure prices for their research. Then again, students and faculty members don't generate subscription income as a rule, do they?

I'm also ticked because I recently completed an article for the Newsletter of the Chemistry Division of SLA on - wait for it - finding chemical and petroleum prices, and of course I mentioned the "People and Prices" section of CMR. (It was the editor, Mary Ann Mahoney, who e-mailed me with this news.)

I wonder if it's worth flooding the publisher with a number of angry e-mails? I will pass this information on to the chemical engineering professors on my campus, and ask them to consider taking some action about it; they will not be happy about it, to be sure. The editors of CMR may not have considered that this decision might alienate a few users, and yet this is what has happened; pity. Dumb, stoopid move.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

:: From a message sent by Christine Orr of AIP, which appeared on various listservs:

The American Institute of Physics is pleased to announce that beginning this week, all AIP journal abstract pages will carry a message informing users that their access is provided via their library’s subscription. Once a user is IP-authenticated, each abstract view will display a small banner stating, “Your access to J. Appl. Physics [e.g.] is provided by the subscription of [institution].”

Continue reading "AIP Introduces Library Branding" »

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: From a post on LIBLICENCE-L:

In September 2003, we announced that papers in our Electronic Journals had been enhanced by links to citing articles from The American Physical Society and NASA's Astrophysical Data System. I'm pleased to report that our 'Articles citing this article' tool has now been developed further. In keeping with our tradition of innovation, we have become the first publisher to implement 'cited-by' links using CrossRef's Forward Linking service.

We have made 'cited-by' links available for papers published in the last 10 years. Over the coming months, we will be working our way through our entire journal archive, back to 1874. To take a look at forward linking in action, go to the following paper from New Journal of Physics and select the 'Articles citing this article link' on the right hand side:

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1367-2630/1/1/006

New Journal of Physics is our open-access electronic-only title (co-owned by the Institute of Physics and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft) so the 'cited-by' links are available to all. For our other journals, this facility is limited to subscribers.

Continue reading "IoP To Offer "Cited By" Links Using CrossRef" »

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: The latest issue of First Monday includes the article, Economics of Scientific and Biomedical Journals: Where Do Scholars Stand in the Debate of Online Journal Pricing and Site License Ownership between Libraries and Publishers?, by Haekyung Jeon-Slaughter, Andrew C Herkovic, and Michael A Keller:

The emergence of e�journals brought a great change in scholarly communication and in the behavior of scholars. However, the importance of scholars� behavior in the pricing of scientific journal has been largely ignored in the recent debate between libraries and publishers over site license practices and pricing schemes. Stanford�s survey results indicate that sharply increasing costs are the main reason for individual subscription cancellation, driving users to rely on library or other institutional subscriptions. Libraries continue to be a vital information provider in the electronic era and their bargaining power in the market and the importance of roles in scholarly communication will be increased by branding and a strong relationship with users. Publishers� strategy for thriving in the electronic era is not to lose personal subscribers. Cooperation among the three sectors � scholars, libraries, and publishers � promises optimal results for each sector more than ever.

Worldwide, more than 30 million hours of unique television programming are broadcast every year, yet only a tiny fraction of it is preserved for future reference, and only a fraction of that preserved footage is publicly accessible. Most television broadcasts are simply lost forever, though television archivists have been working to preserve selected programs for fifty years. Recent reductions in the cost of storage of digital video could allow preservation of this portion of our culture for a small fraction of the worldwide library budget, and improvements in the distribution of online video could enable much greater collaboration between archival institutions.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: George Porter forwarded this post from Peter Suber on Open Access News, which will be of interest to engineering librarians, especially mechanical:

Hindawi Publishing has announced that The International Journal of Rotating Machinery has converted to open access, effective immediately. From the announcement: 'IJRM is edited by Prof Wen-Jei Yang of the University of Michigan, USA. The journal employs an open access model based on article processing charges to be paid by the authors' institution or research grant. The journal shall have an online edition which is free with no subscription or registration barriers and a print edition which shall be priced at a level reasonable for covering the printing cost. All articles published in the journal shall be distributed under the "Creative Commons Attribution License," which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Hindawi is currently working on retro-digitizing the back volumes of the journal and will make these volumes available online in the near future.' (PS: Kudos to Hindawi for this important step.)

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: Taylor & Francis has revised its alert service, SARA - Scholarly Articles Research Alerting:

Taylor & Francis currently publishes over 950 academic peer-reviewed journals across a variety of disciplines. In response to the changing needs of the academic community, we are using the Internet actively to disseminate information about journals in advance of publication.

SARA - Scholarly Articles Research Alerting - is a service designed to deliver by email, tables of contents for any issue of Psychology Press, Routledge, or Taylor & Francis journals to anyone who has requested the information. This service is completely free of charge and you can select to receive alerts by keyword, title, sub-category or *main category.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

:: The American Institute of Physics is offering online access to the entire backfile of AIP journals. From the AIP site:

All subscriptions to AIP journals at the institutional rate include access to a five-year online backfile. In 2005, we�re offering extended access to all AIP journals back to Volume 1, Issue 1. This lets you provide your patrons with thousands of additional articles online.

For an annual maintenance fee of only $95 each ($130 for The Journal of Chemical Physics, Journal of Applied Physics, and Applied Physics Letters), your patrons can now access the entire backfile of AIP journals � a significant increase over the number of articles available online with a regular subscription. Complete backfile access is also included with select AIP combination subscriptions. While research in many scientific disciplines rapidly becomes obsolete, the results obtained in physics often remain sought after for many years.

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: As reported some time ago, Cornell U Life Sciences Librarian Phil Davis, through simple keyword searching, identified 409 articles from 67 journals published by Emerald that had been republished between 1989 and 2003, without notification. Davis' initial study will be published in v49 n2 Spring 2005 issue of Library Resources & Technical Services

Davis is now reporting that the duplication is more extensive than first reported. He has submitted a letter to the editor of LR&TS, expected to be published in the v49 n4, Summer 2005 issue. The draft manuscript is available on his web site:

Article duplication within Emerald/MCB publications is more extensive than first reported. It has now been identified in 73 journals spanning a period from 1975 to 2003. This letter will address updates to the initial findings and react to Emerald�s response. It will investigate the relationships between Emerald, MCB and Barmarick Publications, and shed light on possible conflicts of interest in management functioning simultaneously as owners, editors and authors. Is this a case where commercial interests have outweighed editorial independence?

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: Joe Kraus, on the ReedElsevier listserv, writes:

I read in the SLA rag, Information Outlook, that the Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU) of Loughborough University in Leicestershire, UK had written a report -- Scholarly Journal Prices: Selected Trends and Comparisons. "This report, published with the permission of Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, documents the results of the Journals Pricing Analysis project, undertaken by LISU for OUP."

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/pages/publications/oup.html

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/downloads/op34.pdf

Take a look at "Fig 2.5 Median journal prices - science" on page 15 of the PDF. This is particularly interesting. But, Elsevier does have /somewhat average/ median price per page, (see page 20 of the PDF), but Elsevier is still the highest for "Fig 2.12 Median price per point of impact factor 1993-2003" on page 23 of the PDF.

Of course, there is a lot more to consider and read from this 122 page report than my very short synopsis.

Continue reading "Scholarly Journal Prices: Selected Trends and Comparisons - New Report from LISU" »

Posted by Randy Reichardt at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

:: As posted to PAMNET on 15 November 2004

:MELVILLE, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 15, 2004 - The American Institute of Physics announced today that it will off