What librarians can do

• Liberate yourself from fund-raising for high-cost journals
• Support high-value publishers and new models of scholarly communication
• Encourage self-archiving by authors
• Participate in the community responsibility to assess the costs and value of journals

The full presentation is available at http://www.sla.org/division/dpam/conferences/2003/serials/serials.html.

Journal Value Project
Travis Warwick

This piece of the program focused on a journal value project conducted at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. In the tradition of Henry Barschall's work in the late 1980's, cost per character data was collected for 1,520 journals. Dividing a journal's cost per 1,000 characters by its ISI Impact Factor provides a more comprehensive measure of its value than cost or Impact Factor alone can offer. Because this method of evaluation could benefit all librarians, the data collected will be made publicly available through a Web-based database later this year. It is expected that future collaboration with interested institutions will update and expand the database to include a broader list of titles over an extended number of years. For more information see: http://math.library.wisc.edu/JVP.

Exchange rate profiteering and cost-effectiveness of physics journals
Dana Roth

"Society publishers (such as the APS and ACS) have clearly shown that recruiting editors and reviewers, managing the editorial process, maintaining an electronic infrastructure, and processing subscriptions and advertisements can be accomplished at a very reasonable cost. However, the significant role that share-holders, stock prices and management bonuses now play, in the economics of commercially published journals, has resulted in subscriptions costs that are no longer either justified or sustainable."

The full presentation is available at http://www.sla.org/division/dpam/conferences/2003/serials/roth.pdf.

NOTE from Dana: MIT has a Web page that relates to the problem of expensive journals at http://libraries.mit.edu/about/journals/index.html entitled "Scholarly Communication: Issues in the Journal Publishing Environment." It has links to:

• "Faculty Assistance Sought as Libraries Respond to Pressures from Commercial Publishers." This letter calls the faculty's attention to issues in the scholarly publishing environment that threaten the delivery of a full range of information resources. February 2003
• "Journals Purchasing Environment Poses New Problems." This article outlines in more detail the issues addressed in the letter from the FCLS. February 5, 2003
• "MIT Libraries' Journal Subscriptions Over $5,000 in 2003." This table provides a list of the Libraries' most expensive journal titles, along with the publishers, the prices, and the percent increase from the previous year.
• "Top 20 Journal Publishers by $'s Spent." This table provides a list of the major journal publishers and indicates the percentage of total journals expense and the percentage of titles purchased.

Thieme's Leading Chemistry Journals
Alexandra Williams, Sales Manager, Electronic Products

Thieme Publishers was honored to be invited to speak at the PAM session on periodicals pricing. Thieme is an independent family-owned company established in 1886. Thieme was asked to contribute to the session as a commercial publisher which provides high quality publications while maintaining reasonable pricing, thus committing to a fair, and sustainable model of scholarly publishing. Thieme's leading chemistry journals, Synthesis and Synlett, were discussed to exemplify their model. Synthesis and Synlett are both within the top ten impact factor for chemistry titles, and are priced comparably with similar not-for-profit journals.