Regarding Cornell's plan's to cancel Elsevier journals:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2003_11_09_fosblogarchive.html#
What is all the fuss about?
The Physics Department of the University of Oldenburg has canceled all
commercial journals, with the exception of small ones (less than 200 E),
and is certainly keeping all the APS journals, because of PROLA access,
and using the freed money for ordering single copies when necessary. We
are also improving information on online access methods, and training
readers to:
- search first for whatever information you want, from whomever you want
- search for the author's home institution and homepage via PhysNet
http://www.physnet.net using either PhysDep (departmental information
or by PhysDoc (scientific documents)
- email the author and ask for a copy or a reprint, or a preprint
- and thereby tell him: I am till now perhaps unknown to you, but this
shows my interest, and that I am working in the field. (And maybe ask him
a question: that means communicate, rather than just passively reading...)
Our tests suggest: This works mostly within 24 hours, costs nothing, improves
oneself being recognized by famous authors.
Self-archiving serves this to you. Let me know your experiences.
Ebs
P.S. As of recently, PhysDoc is now covering virtually all self-archived
scientific documents in Physics at German Physics departments, institutes.
> http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/index.html
> aus: Cornell Universitiy Library - Issues in Scholarly Communication
>
> "For many years, increases in the prices of library materials in all
> formats (including more recently electronic) have generally
> exceeded—sometimes significantly—increases in library acquisitions
> budgets. Libraries have worked hard to minimize the effects of this
> imbalance, but we are now reaching a point at which many institutions,
> including Cornell, are for this reason no longer able to provide access
> to some standard materials needed for instruction and research.
>
> [...]
>
> The Elsevier Subscription
>
> As noted elsewhere on this Web site, the prices of commercial science
> journals increase at a much higher rate than those of the
> not-for-profits. There are a number of such publishers—Wiley, Springer,
> Kluwer—but the paradigmatic commercial science publisher is Elsevier,
> and there are indeed special challenges associated with subscribing to
> Elsevier.
>
> [...]
>
> In 2003, we were able to maintain our subscriptions to Elsevier
> journals, only because we received one-time assistance from the
> University Librarian. The primary purpose of this 2003 one-time funding
> was to buy us some time, so that we would be able to explain these
> issues to Library users, and prepare for the possibility that we would
> need to cancel a significant number of Elsevier journals for 2004.
>
> It is now nearly 2004, and the need to undertake such a cancellation
> effort has arrived. We can no longer subscribe to so many Elsevier
> journals (including duplicates) that we no longer need. We must now free
> up some of the money spent on Elsevier journals to pay for journals
> published by other publishers that are more needed by our users. We have
> explained this to Elsevier in lengthy discussions, both through our
> research library consortium and then independently. We have tried in
> these discussions to broker an arrangement that would allow us to cancel
> some Elsevier titles without such a large price increase to the titles
> remaining—but Elsevier has been unwilling to accept any of our proposals.
>
> We are therefore planning to cancel several hundred Elsevier journals
> for 2004. The decisions on cancellations will be made on the basis of
> faculty input, as well as several years of statistical information on
> individual journal use. As will be clear from the remarks above, we have
> been preparing for this cancellation, while hoping to avoid it, for more
> than a year—so we do feel we know at this point which journals to cancel
> that will have the least impact on research and instruction at Cornell.
> Once the cancellations are complete, we will list the titles on this site. "
> "...we do feel we know at this point which journals to cancel
> that will have the least impact on research and instruction at Cornell.
> Once the cancellations are complete, we will list the titles on this site. "
Received on Wed Nov 12 2003 - 18:10:35 GMT