Christa Easton, Co-Editor The Balance Point

Too MANY JOURNALS, IN TOO MANY FORMS?

Christa Easton, Column Editor

Libraries face consistent and well-documented pres- sures to pay for and maintain their established serials subscriptions. Rising prices, static budgets, and infla- tion interact to make each library’s existing serials col- lection beyond its means for future years. At the same time, publishers continue to publish new titles, increas- ing the competition for subscription dollars. Publishers have also begun to make their stock of journals avail- able electronically, often with a surcharge above the basic subscription cost. These electronic versions can be a drain on budgets, as well as a drain on the time and ingenuity of library staff who must find efficient and effective ways to handle these new materials. Yet new journals, and new forms of journals, have much to offer library patrons. While library budgets and librarians may be overwhelmed by new titles and new formats, both enter the market after increasingly careful consid- eration. This Balance Point examines the consider- ations behind launching new journals, both print and electronic, and new journal products.

Easton is with the Serials Department, Meyer Library, Stanford, CA 94305-6004, (65 1) 723-7907, <teas- ton@sulmail.stanford.edu>.

Michael Brown, founder and editor of Catch, dis- cusses how his local environment and experience led him to create the literary ‘zine. Janet Fisher, of MIT Press, examines the pressures publishers face to pub- lish new scholarly journals and how those pressures have changed with time and the rise of electronic pub- lishing. Fisher notes with some alarm that the refusal of scholarly presses to publish new titles may lead to increased self-publishing. Brown’s goals in founding

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Catch led him to create his own ‘zine, rather than turn- ing to a scholarly press, but the relative ease with which he published illustrates that scholarly presses’ role in organizing and facilitating scholarly information flow may wane along with their willingness to produce new titles. Amy Tucker examines the opportunities of elec- tronic publishing in her examination of the Institute of Physics’ (IoP) electronic publishing program. IoP takes advantage of the electronic form to publish articles more quickly and provide links among articles, making the electronic version more valuable for research than the print.

The three authors present sharply differing views on the issues of publishing new journals and taking jour- nals into new formats. Their work was not intended to offer a panacea for overworked library staff or strained library budgets, but to illustrate that the difficulties of title proliferation and format spread are continuing realities. Technological innovations will continue to play a particular role in these proliferations, as desktop publishing and the Internet make ‘zines easier to pro- duce and distribute and as publishers and readers inte- grate technology into the production and use of scholarly journals.

WHY I PUBLISHED CATCH

Michael Brown

Blake de Pastino, Arts and Literature Editor of Albu- querque’s ~ekl~~ AZibi, wrote in his Preface to Catch, Volume 1, “Here, we know our town’s writers the way we know the boulevards that dissect Central Avenue.” There are a remarkable number of published writers living in this city, and it is true that they are as prized as Albuquerque’s claimed portion of Route 66. From Tony Hillerman to Joey Santiago Baca, from Rudolph0 Anaya to Melinda Snodgrass, from Chris Offutt to Lisa Gill, their names are mentioned with reverence as though they are good friends of the family. Our support is not limited to the professionals, though: we are equally protective of our amateur writers. It is as though Albuquerque has come to understand the effort it takes to write and is therefore more sensitive to those struggling with the craft.

Albuquerque has not always been so openly sup- portive of its literary community. In fact, only within the last five or six years has public opinion of local lit-

erature ceased to be anything more than apathetic. Coincidentally, there have been several other literary firsts in that time: Weekly Alibi, provider of Albuquer- que’s most comprehensive forum for local arts and lit- erature, began publishing in Fall 1992; in 1995, an outcropping of local bookstores and coffee houses began hosting regular open-mic readings; and in 1996, a new wave of public reading known as Slam Poetry began to gain popularity, indicating a growing public acceptance of local literature.

My attendance at such readings and book signings brought me to the realization that there are more writers living in Albuquerque than I previously thought, most of them unpublished. And so it was in 1995 that I began to place serious thought in the idea of publishing a jour- nal of local fiction and poetry.

Initially, I decided to publish what is, for better or worse, known as a ‘zine. This form of publishing is characteristically inexpensive to produce; almost every task, from design to binding to distribution, is done by hand. Regardless of the method of manufacturing, however, I decided that Catch should not appear thrown together. I designed and typeset the pages myself; I photocopied the text block; I made a trade arrangement with a local printing house -- I gave them ad space in exchange for free, two-color printing; and I spent a few days with a local conservationist in a crash course in hand binding. And while it is still considered a ‘zine, the end product looked much less like a typical ‘zinc and more like a bona fide, marketable anthology than I had expected.

Catch satisfied my desire to publish, and it gave me the opportunity to contribute to Albuquerque’s expand- ing literary consciousness. More to the point, it was fun. The foremost purpose of Catch is to provide an outlet for the growing population of local writers and their followers. The success of the first volume sup- ports my belief that Albuquerque is in the throes of a major literary growth spurt, and I have begun to ques- tion whether or not my frugal 200-copy print mn was adequate. Still, though, I have no desire for Catch to become a national review of arts and literature; rather, as it is in scope a local endeavor, I hope that its appeal will remain local.

Brown is with the Serials & Acquistions Depart- ment, University of New Mexico’s Zimmerman Library, Albuquerque, NM 87131-1466, (505) 277- 8899, ~ickeyb~unm.edu>.

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WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT YET ANOTHER

SCHOLARLY JOURNAL?

Janet H. Fisher

Despite many assertions from librarians in the last few years that there are too many scholarly journals already, publishers are still receiving proposals for new ones. This situation is a good example of the diverse cus- tomer base that publishers must satisfy with a scholarly journal publication. Customers are authors and researchers, without which the journal would not exist, but purchasing customers are less likely to be authors and readers and more likely to be libraries. The author/ reader customer group still sees the need for new jour- nals even though the purchasing market is overbur- dened and less and less capable of paying for them.

About half the reasons publishers hear for starting new scholarly journals have existed for at least the last twenty years:

New fields are emerging and the research needs an outlet for publication and dissemination.

New approaches to old fields are being kept out of the existing conservative journals, so the research needs a new outlet for publication and dissemina- tion.

The existing journals are not keeping up with the flow of papers and are no longer timely (the back- log-of-accepted-papers problem).

Interdisciplina~ fields (e.g., gender studies, cul- tural studies, media studies, urban studies, cogni- tive science) have no publication outlet in the existing journals, so a new outlet for publication and dissemination is needed.

To show that some things have changed, publishers are now unlikely to hear the following reasons which were common in the past:

* A new journal is needed to establish the reputation of the editor, or the reputation of a new dep~ment, university or research organization.

l A new association needs its own publication as a benefit for members.

On the down side for both librarians and publishers with limited budgets, there are now some new reasons being used to justify the start of a new journal:

. Fields which have formerly been separate need to build links in recognition of increasing synergy

between the fields (e.g., computer science and engineering, business and economics, computer science and cognitive science).

Existing journals are too expensive and inaccessi- ble (i.e., there aren’t individual subscriptions).

A journal in a new format (i.e., electronic) will allow the publication of material that was not pos- sible in print (such as data sets, appendices, soft- ware, color images).

An association wants to move its journal to another publisher but finds that “their” journal is owned by their publisher and therefore not “theirs” to move.

At MIT Press we now have signific~tly higher stan- dards for new journal proposals to meet before we are willing to make the financial investment and commit- ment. We have found it much harder to get new jour- nals to a break-even financial position for several reasons:

The number of libraries that will subscribe to a new journal in the first three years is less than half what it would have been ten years ago, and about a fourth of what it would have been twenty years ago.

The number of individuals willing to subscribe directly has gone down as the number of journals and the demands on their time have increased.

Universities are less willing to subsidize the edito- rial operations of journals, meaning that the pub- lisher has to pick up a larger share of the financial risk.

Publishers have to prepare to publish in both print and electronic forms when there is no clear evi- dence showing when the costs will be recovered.

My fear is that the tightening of standards for new journals will not keep them from happening, but will instead encourage more self-publication and the devel- opment of nontraditional businesses to support them. The publishing environment could become even more complicated for librarians, researchers, and indexing and abstracting services than it currently is.

Fisher is Associate Director for Journals Publishing at the MIT Press, Five Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, (617) 253-2864, <jfisher@mit.edur.

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ELECTRONICJOURNALS:FULFILLINGA MISSION AT THJ~IN~TITUTEOF PHYSICS

Amy ‘Ibcker

Institute of Physics Publishing prides itself in the

value-added benefits and improved accessibility that its electronic journals service brings to its print base. Access is offered at no extra cost to an institutional print subscription, with no plans to change this model in the future.

The latest release, Version 2.0 (EJ 2.0) (http:// www.iop.org) features powerful linking technology in

the form of HyperCiteTM, a joint project with the Insti- tution of Electrical Engineers. It is available to all users at the 1,200 plus IoP Electronic Journal registered sites

and enables them to link from journal references to the relevant abstract in the INSPEC database, a collection of over six and a half million scientific and technical abstracts dating back to 1969. HyperCiteIM also links to IoP’s own abstract and full text archive (currently back to 1996, extending to 1993 onwards in 1998), and importantly, the full text of papers held in the Los Ala- mos pre-print archive. In this way, users can research papers cited by, and papers citing, their selected arti- cles.

The new service is the result of several years of investment of time and money into electronic publish- ing, and our early entry into this arena has reaped its benefits in terms of the experience gained. So when and

how did we begin on this path, and where is it taking us?

The electronic journal is certainly not a new concept. In fact it has been in transition for the previous two decades. During this time the “serials crisis” was a much-discussed issue within the library and informa- tion communities. Print journal circulation per title had been falling, partly due to the sheer increase in the vol-

ume of material being produced, leading to an increase in journal titles released, and partly due to the fact that library budgets were no longer expanding in real terms.

Meanwhile new electronic means were emerging that highlighted the limitations of the traditional schol- arly publishing model. Storage, access and time lapse in release of information were becoming problems. Technology was contributing to the growing biblio- graphic awareness of users, and libraries were finding it increasingly difficult to meet user demand for mate- rial. It was clear that we needed to explore new ways of disseminating out material.

As a physics publisher, we had the advantage that our customer base was already tuned in to the Internet and electronic services. Physics is an area where rapid dissemination of results is important, and as such this community was responsible for pioneering the World Wide Web and also e-print services such as Ginsparg’s High Energy Physics site (http://xxx.lanl.gov/) at Los Alamos. A transition to electronic publishing for us seemed to be the obvious next step.

The reported projects looking into the dissemination of electronic information stem from the 1970s.’ Other projects were established in the 1980’s, but it was not until the 1990’s that work began in earnest across pub- lishers. In the UK, the 1993 Follett Report2 sparked off a whole new set of publisher/librarian collaborations. Commissioned by the British Library, the report assessed the role of the academic library in the future, with a particular emphasis on information technology applications. As a result of the report, the Electronic Libraries Program was established, guided by the spe- cifically appointed Follett Implementation Group for Information Technology (FIGIT). The program was set up with a fund of fifteen million pounds to fund thirty projects aimed at equipping universities and colleges for the “information explosion.” Many were publisher / academic collaborations, with the publisher providing the means and material for dissemination and the aca- demic libraries providing test sites and user feedback.

In 1993 Institute of Physics Publishing initiated Project Elvyn3, funded by the British Library as part of their research and development program (BLRDD) project. Project Elvyn experimented with electronic access to a selection of IoP journals. This showed us something of the problems and issues involved with electronic journals.

We had adopted TeX and LaTeX formats into our production procedure in the late 1980’s; this not only allowed our authors to submit electronically, but also aided the development of our first electronic version, Classical and Quantum Gravity. This was launched in 1994 via listserv, gopher and the Web. In 1995, Physics Express Letters, the accumulated rapid communica- tions from twelve of our journals, were made freely available in full text HTML on the World Wide Web. This service is still available today at no cost to the user. Our continuing research and the accelerated development in available technologies led to a world first launch, when in January 1996, we released our entire serials output (then thirty-one journals) in full text Postscript and PDF (Portable Document Format) files on the World Wide Web. Our electronic journals

-THEBALANCEPOINT- V0~.23,No.3 (FALL 1997) 67

can be accessed weeks or months ahead of the print journal. Forthcoming articles are available for selected titles, in addition to accelerated publishing where arti- cles are made available online as soon as they are accepted.

The current role of electronic publishing within our organization is to meet market needs through added- value to our print base. To help us do this we run a cus- tomer focused research program, comprised of focus groups, library advisory meetings, questionnaire sur- veys, and listening to and acting on the feedback we receive.

In response to this research we continually develop and update our service. In July 1996, we introduced a range of ‘Personalization options’ including personal- ized main menu, personal default searching, e-mail alerting and a virtual filing cabinet which allows the user to save and add annotations to their articles of interest. In November of the same year we introduced domain name registration for institutions and abolished the need for obligatory site and user passwords. Since then we have offered a multi-level service which includes optional registration for enhanced features and a remote service allowing access to abstracts from out- side the institution.

However one important issue remains unresolved; despite the hopes of the information and academic communities, the electronic medium has not brought an end to the problems of pricing in serials. We are con- tinuing to explore the possibilities in this area. In the meantime we have tried to keep things simple for our customers by offering the Electronic Journals service at no extra cost to an institutional print subscription. Use of the service is obtained on completion of a simple site registration form and includes online access to 1996 and 1997 papers. From 1998 onwards this will extend to include access to full text back to 1993.

As technology and user awareness to the medium improves, the provision of electronic scholarly infor-

mation is becoming increasingly innovative and com-

petitive. Every section of the scholarly chain, academics, information professionals, aggregators and

software providers are vying for the right to dissemi- nate information electronically.

As publishers we have the experience of years of production and provision of high quality information

on which to build. We realize the importance of main- taining intuitive and easy access to our material. We are

also aware that for the end-user, it is the range of mate-

rial, not the individual publisher, that matters to them.

EJ 2.0 with HyperCiterM is a first step to incorporat-

ing external resources as an integral part of our service. The next step is the introduction of true cross-publisher

linking with the aim of providing subject wide access points to information. Thus, electronic publishing is an

important tool in aiding Institute of Physics to fulfill it’s mission to “promote the advancement and dissemi- nation of a knowledge of and education in the science

of physics pure and applied.“4

NOTES

1. D. Gotze. “Electronic Journals: Market Technology,”

Publishing Reseurch Quarterly, (Spring 1995).

2. Follett. Joint Funding Council k Libraries Review

Group: Report (1993).

3. F. Rowland, C. McKnight, and J. Meadows. Project

Elvyn:An Experiment in Electronic Journals Delivety Facts,

Figures and Findings. (Bowker Saur, 1993).

4. Institute of Physics Royal Charter.

Tucker is Electronic Journals Product Manager,

Institute of Physics Publishing, Dirac House, Tem-

ple Back, Bristol, BS 1 6BE UK, <amy.tucker@ioppublishing.co.uk>.

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