[Asis-l] RE: OAI Service Providers ...

Mon Jan 26 14:35:47 EST 2004

Subject: Peter Gregory and Charles Casey on 'Open Archives Initiatives' 

Peter Gregory, the Royal Society of Chemistry's director of publishing,
explains what open archive initiatives could mean, both to scientific
research and to learned societies, in an editorial in the final issue of
Chemistry in Britain (2003, 39(12), 33):

http://www.rsc.org/members/chembrit.htm

Some points that I hadn't previously considered include:

1. The charitable activities of many society publishers in the UK (and
presumably the rest of the world) would not be possible without income from
their publishing activities.

2. Should authors have to cover the cost of the submissions that are
rejected, since this is a fairly substantial cost?

3. Industrial authors are few and industrial readers are many. Should
academic authors subsidize industrial research and information acquisition?

4. Who is really excluded in the current 'reader pays' system?  Users in the
poorist countries generally have free access and users in countries (e.g.
Russia, Australia and Israel) and large organizations (e.g. in India, China,
California, Ohio) have comprehensive access to RSC publications thru
centrally paid consortium deals.

Dr. Gregory's concerns mirror those of the new ACS president Charles Casey
who, in his Message from the President (C&E News 2004, 82(01), 2-5 ..
January 5), stated "At least partially in response to the high cost of
commercial journals, a second trend calling for "open access" publishing has
developed. It calls for Internet publishing to make journals free for all to
read. ...Rep. Martin O. Sabo (D-Minn.) has proposed legislation that would
require free access to publication of federally supported research. This
would effectively remove copyright protection for ACS and other scientific
journals. It would bias the publishing system toward the open-access model
and would fatally damage publications of scientific societies. ACS has
taken a strong position against the Sabo bill because the legislation would
destroy ACS's ability to fulfill its mission of providing high-quality
chemical publications at a reasonable cost." 

In discussing Open Access, I personally agree with Dr. Casey that "the
solution to soaring library costs does not lie with open-access publishing
but rather with electronic journals from scientific societies that are made
available at reasonable costs. The solution will also require scientists to
exert pressure on commercial publishers. The time has come for chemists
who are editors or editorial board members of commercial journals to use
their considerable influence to strongly urge publishers to greatly reduce
their prices. I believe it is also time for chemists to consider whether
they will continue to support exorbitantly priced commercial journals by
serving as editors, editorial board members, authors, and referees!"

In this regard, please compare the 2003 cost/page data* for
inorganic/organometallic chemistry journals, which surely is indicative of
the source of current funding problems in research libraries.

Journal title           cost/page(2003)

Inorganic Chemistry(ACS)      $0.29
Organometallics(ACS)		$0.43
Dalton Transactions(RSC)	$0.52
Eur. J. Inorg. Chem.(VCH-GDC)	$0.71
J. Biol. Inorg. Chem.(S-V)	$0.95      
Inorg. Chim. Acta(Els)        $1.90 
J. Organomet. Chem.(Els)      $2.04	
Polyhedron(Els)               $2.17

(*) Costs are for comparable print+site wide electronic access (ACS
Print+15% 1996+, RSC 1997+, Wiley-VCH print+25% 1998+, Springer-Verlag
1996+, Elsevier print+25% 1995+) 

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

-----Original Message-----
From: ELDNET-L-owner at u.washington.edu
[mailto:ELDNET-L-owner at u.washington.edu]On Behalf Of Gerry Mckiernan
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2004 10:58 AM
To: lita-l at ala1.ala.org; arl-ejournal at arl.org; SPARC-IR at arl.org;
asis-L at asis.org; OAI-eprints at fafner.openlib.org;
rclis at fafner.openlib.org; gerrymck at iastate.edu
Subject: OAI Service Providers: SciTech and SocSci/Humanities (ReDox)

     OAI Service Providers: SciTech and SocSci/Humanities

In my haste two weeks ago to (self-)promote [:-) my two recent articles
about 
OAI Service Providers: SciTech and SocSci/Humanities,  I failed to list
the services eProfiled
in each. In addition, I inadvertently mounted a read-only PDF version
for each, which 
were replaced with read/printing versions earlier today.  

Please find below the names and URLs of the OAI Service Providers
beneath the
citation for each article:

Gerry McKiernan. "Open Archives Initiative Service Providers. Part
I: Science and Technology," _Library Hi Tech News_ 20 no. 9:  (November
2003): 30-38.

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/OAI-SP-I.pdf]

**Arc: A Cross A rchive Search Service**
[http://arc.cs.odu.edu/ ]

**Citebase**
[http://citebase.eprints.org/ ]

**my.OAI**
[http://www.myoai.com]

**Open Archives Initiative Information in Engineering, Computer
Science, and Physics
(Grainger Engineering Library, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign)**
[http://g118.grainger.uiuc.edu/engroai/]

**SAIL-eprints (Search, Alert, Impact and Link)**
[ http://eprints.bo.cnr.it/ ]

AND

Gerry McKiernan. "Open Archives Initiative Service Providers. Part
II:  Social Sciences and Humanities,"  _Library Hi Tech News_  20 no.
10:
(December 2003): 24-31.

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/OAI-SP-II.pdf] 

**AmericanSouth** 
[ http://americansouth.org ]

**Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)
[http://www.language-archives.org/]

**Sheet Music Consortium**
[ http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/]

**UIUC Digital  Gateway to Cultural Heritage Materials**
[http://nergal.grainger.uiuc.edu/cgi/b/bib/bib-idx ]

  Enjoy (again)!

/Gerry 

Gerry McKiernan
Latte-drinking, Sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, 
New York Times-reading, Left-Wing Librarian
Iowa State University 
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu 

"If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
[ http://www.sric.org/voices/2003/v4n2/ ]