PAM Bulletin: Vol. 32, No. 4

PAMnet News

Debra Bailey
dbailey@sparta.rice.edu

Article numbers, OpenURL, & WoK

George S. Porter posed the question,"How annoying and puzzling is it to other librarians that ISI's Web of Knowledge is unable to pass article numbers to OpenURL resolvers?" He raised the issue of AGU and APS journals using article numbers rather than page numbers and sees this as an implementation flaw on the part of the A&I vendor. Matthew R. Marsteller states,"I would hesitate to put a lot of blame on the A&I community though. They didn't start the "fire"-they're being asked to put it out." Mark Doyle, APS, contributed,"APS article numbers were designed to act just like page numbers (they may be specified as page numbers in any of our linking interfaces or in CrossRef for instance). More to the point, they were designed to allow us to publish articles online as soon as they were ready rather than an issue at a time while maintaining a single citation of the article." Philip Heller, ISI Thomson, chimed in,"our investigation of this matter found that we are providing the article number in the OpenURL. The problem that originated this is actually in the link server." George Porter wrapped up this exchange and noted,"the current disconnect which I've been experiencing is a poor handling of the article number by a commercial link resolver, rather than being an ISI-based problem"Š"despite repeated attempts to rectify/clarify the article number issue over the last 5 months, ISI did not respond or acknowledge the direct contacts. PAMNET, however, gets results. For the record, ISI is handling article numbers as prescribed in the OpenURL standards. I was experiencing a faulty implementation of the parsing of the OpenURL, of which our link resolver supplier has been notified and already indicated that they are working on fixing."

Alternative publishing models

Brian Simboli cross-posted a response to: http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind05&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&F=l&P=6121; Simboli states, "The subscription overlay model is the for-pay version of the overlay discussed in my two documents linked at: http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ bcst/Agenda_Pub.html. >Carol Hutchins reports,"The subscription overlay journal example I am most familiar with is "ADV THEOR MATH PHYS (International Press) Full text free, with arXiv overlay, www.intlpress.com/journals/ATMP/" With respect to "the physics societies" in general, I believe that there are changes in some articles from time of submission to arxiv and actual release of said article on journal website." Simboli clarified,"The larger context of my comments is:

Why make authors self-archive? Why not do it for them, obviating all that hassle?

The physics societies are well positioned to lead the way on full-fledged subscription overlays, and therefore for serving as an exemplar in this respect for other subject areas (non-physics).

We've already seen, with NIH, and Nature, just how problematic the green (self-archiving) approach to making articles accessible is.

A. Ben Wagner contributed,"Something I've wanted to comment on. It's not just a question of workload on the individual scholar that makes self-archiving a bad idea. I think the term "self-archiving" is an oxymoron and denigrates the term archive. An archive has processes, procedures, institutional backing, moral and sometimes legal obligations all with the objective of providing reasonable assurances that 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now scholars can access the content. Can anyone seriously think that faculty mounting their publications to a personal or departmental web page is archiving? I'm not sure even an institutional repository should be called an archive. That depends on the evidence of long-term commitment, policies, procedures, etc. that an institution puts in place. IMHO, so called "self-archiving" should be called what it really is: "temporary storage". Hutchins agreed with Simboliąs point of view on this.

Why keep the print?

In one of the liveliest threads on PAMNET in the past year, Michael Leach posed the question "Why keep the print?" and suggested several answers: Preservation, Quality, Access vs. Ownership, and Reliability, along with detailed counter arguments for all of the reasons. A. Ben Wagner suggested keeping the print for the ads, conference information, letters to the editor, cover art, subscription and other front matter, and erratum. He provided two examples of researchers needing the ephemera not provided in the online sources. Gary Davidoff reframed the question to"What do publishers need to do to enable us to discard the print?" He sees discarding the print as the ultimate eventuality as libraries run out of shelf space. Cathy Outten asked for thoughts about keeping print when microfilm is available. A. Ben Wagner gives four arguments against microfilm:

Loss of color = loss of information
Patrons hate the stuff and not without reason. Even libraries that have "good" modern equipment (and often they don't), seldom have been able to invest in a "print on demand" microform machine that will automatically spit out a readable paper copy, say, of the 300 pages of report on 10 microfiche.
poor quality microfilm, gray on gray
front matter, ads, supplemental material may not be filmed.

Sara Tompson and Shaun Hardy gave examples of what is going on in their libraries regarding depository transfers of print journals. Bob Michaelson asked "what do publishers need to do to make us feel completely secure in changing our current subscriptions to online-only?" Matthew R. Marsteller pointed out the difficulty of working with mathematical equations in microfilm. R. Keith Dennis added,"Neither Elsevier nor any other commercial publisher (e.g. Springer) that already have or have announced constructing archives of back files have any plans to provide "equal or superior" copies. They have 300dpi scans, or worse in case of older Elsevier (or Academic Press) journals." A. Ben Wagner commented."That is the issue of where the publisher had rights to publish in print photos, graphics, etc. but did not secure the rights to include them in electronic versions. At least on the CHMINF list, it has been pointed out that certain Science magazine articles have "holes" in some of their electronic articles in place of certain graphics noting "image not available in electronic copy." King envisions the possibility of the market demanding a true XML article in the future, and thinks we'll probably have to buy that content once again and sees this as yet another reason for having a locally-controlled archive."

Article numbers, OpenURL, & WoK

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2= ind0501&L=pamnet&T=0&F=&S=&P=12300

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2= ind0501&L=pamnet&T=0&F=&S=&P=12400

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2 =ind0501&L=pamnet&T=0&F=&S=&P=12626

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2 =ind0501&L=pamnet&T=0&F=&S=&P=12738

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2= ind0501&L=pamnet&T=0&F=&S=&P=12956

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2 =ind0501&L=pamnet&T=0&F=&S=&P=13078

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2 =ind0501&L=pamnet&T=0&F=&S=&P=13180

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2 =ind0502&L=pamnet&T=0&P=2968

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa? A2=ind0502&L=pamnet&T=0&P=3228

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2 =ind0502&L=pamnet&T=0&P=3441

Alternative publishing models