I grew up not far from the ocean, and since moving to the mountains of Virginia, I sometimes miss the shoreline. So, naturally, I am delighted to come to Wilmington and once again smell the ocean breezes and hear the sound of seagulls circling overhead. As a child, and I spent many a summer's day on the beach making sand castles, a favorite activity of mine! Aside from getting a few nasty sunburns, my childhood beach experiences taught me one essential characteristic of the shoreline: No matter how much sand you dig or how elaborate a castle you construct, the ocean surf will gradually reclaim the beach, leaving little trace of your efforts. My experiences with electronic journals this past year have at times reminded me of building sand castles.
In the past decade, wave after wave of new technologies have brought unprecedented change to libraries, and librarians have had to reinvent themselves in response to this change. For more than a decade now, much has been written about the transition from paper to electronic collections in libraries. Previous technologies-of-the-time, be they computer-output microfilm, or CD-ROM, have been utilized in projects and products that seek to facilitate this transition. Today, libraries are experiencing a second wave of electronic publishing.
In the first wave, or what I refer to as "old online," electronic journals were considered to be oddities, often fraught with problems. "Old" online refers to the now seemingly ancient days of pre-Web electronic journals. They relied on proprietary networks, dial-up services, and the early incarnations of the Internet as their access channel. Early electronic-only journals were also born under this model. OCLC pioneered the online electronic journal in 1992 with the introduction of The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials. A key problem with this pioneering journal was getting authors to submit articles for publication in a non-print journal format.
Like their CD-ROM counterparts, early online electronic journals relied on proprietary interfaces, usually customized for the specific features of the journal. Unlike CD-ROM, they suffered less from issues of information timeliness because of the elimination of the physical production and distribution of a disk, yet were plagued by other issues, such as a limited telecommunications infrastructure and multiple client interfaces, with little standardization from title to title.
While a great deal was learned from these early projects, it has only been within the last few years that the major building blocks have emerged to begin the transition in earnest. Today's second wave of E-journal publication is the result of a number of significant recent events dramatically impacting the direction of scholarly electronic publishing.
The emergence of the Web has greatly reduced the entry barriers to electronic publications by providing a ubiquitous real-time distribution channel and eliminating the need to develop and distribute proprietary access systems.
While most electronic publishing is still about "putting paper on the screen," new dynamic data formats such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Portable Document Format (PDF), Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), and others are providing new cost-effective means to "liven" online journal information through color, graphics, document linking, video, and simulation.
Web-based electronic publishing has gained acceptance among the end user community with the introduction of numerous mainstream consumer publications, including such notables as Time, U.S. News and World Report, The Wall Street Journal, Science, and Nature. Nearly every major commercial publisher is offering, or will soon offer, online versions of their publications. Scientific, technical, and medical publishers, long the most conservative and cautious with regard to electronic publishing, are now actively converting and repackaging their information for online distribution.
Today's electronic journals are the fulfillment of what many health care professionals have been dreaming of for years: instantaneous access to medical literature at the point of need. Examination of the literature published about Grateful Med, or other end-user MEDLINE search systems reveals a common thread. While the ability to do one's own literature research was welcomed, many involved in these studies said that what they really needed was access to the full articles, and not just a MEDLINE citation and abstract.
Today's electronic journals have the ability to answer this need, whether it be an HTML-version of the paper original, or the more soothing "look-and-feel" of the original publication as provided by a PDF document.
While much of the present electronic publishing activity is focused on electronic "duplicates" of paper journals, the next wave of E-journals will introduce totally new formats. E-journals will use video, software applets, 3-D modeling, and simulations to go far beyond what was possible in print publications. New initiatives such as the NIH's E-Biomed system, will forge new relationships between researcher-authors and publishers. And there is a good possibility that information consumers in the future will have the ability to create their own customized E-journals, based on their own interests and needs.
Returning to the present, statistics published by the Association of Research Libraries reveal that the number of web-based electronic journals increased from about 300 in 1995 to over 3000 in 1997, a dizzying rate of increase that even exceeds the skyrocketing costs of journal subscriptions!
In the rush to create electronic versions of print journals, many publishers have introduced a free-with-print model, meaning that every print subscriber can get free access to the electronic edition. Free? Sounds really good doesn't it? Well, as this E-Journal Tale will tell, it is wise to proceed with caution.
"Once upon a time..." you receive a letter from a publisher that has very good news...
It starts out with a nice personal touch [Dear Sir/Madam...], so you know the publisher has your best interests in mind...
"Your institutional print subscription entitles you to FREE access to the electronic edition..." there it is, that word "FREE;" it jumps off the page and dances temptingly before your eyes... suddenly, you begin to see journal publishers in a whole new light... [SLIDE: Mother Theresa]
Rubbing your eyes in disbelief, you continue to read the detailed instructions about how you can activate access to this E-journal... "Your subscriber number is a 7-digit number on the mailing label..." but wait, codes on mailing labels?... where are all the mailing labels? Probably well on their way to the local landfill, which makes you wonder if you might need to purchase this book [SLIDE: book cover: The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving] for your staff collection.
OK, somehow, you find the code you need, the next step is to read, interpret and agree to the license. Unlike their print counterparts, E-journals are not "owned" by the library, they are licensed. Read the licenses carefully, and consult with your institution's purchasing department or legal counsel if anything is unclear or uncertain. There are four key areas librarians should pay special attention to:
Defining who your users are. Make certain the wording of any user definition clause will adequately cover all of your potential users, including any legitimate affiliates who should have access to your collection. And if your library is accessible by the general public, be certain that the license allows for the occasional use by them as well.
Authorized use and copyright statements. Librarians should ensure that any fair-use allowed under the Copyright Law and CONTU Guidelines are not taken away by the license. Means of access should also be acceptable to your institution: will access be by IP address validation, or will you need to administer accounts and passwords? Beware of unreasonable access restrictions, such as "users may only access the electronic edition from the building in which the print edition is housed." I always enjoy pointing out the irony of this clause to publishers who insist on this restriction.
The last two areas, Governing Law and Indemnification are standard licensing jargon, probably only understood fully by lawyers, but generally, you will want the governing law to be your local State law, and any Indemnification clauses completely deleted before you sign or agree to the license.
Keep in mind that it is within your power to NOT agree to any terms that you find unacceptable. Publishers often present their most restrictive terms up front, but are usually willing to negotiate more reasonable terms. The University of Virginia recently successfully negotiated a new Inter Library Loan clause in a license presented by the American Chemical Society. The original clause contained a number of items librarians found to be unacceptable:
"The Licensee is responsible for keeping records to show the number of ILL requests fulfilled from each title to the ACS Web Editions and the name of each requesting library. The Licensee shall send ACS a report once each quarter listing the number of requests per title and the names of the requesting libraries. The ACS reserves the right to audit these records during normal business hours, with reasonable notice. Such audit will not occur more than once per year, unless the Licensee is found to be lacking in its record keeping."
The University felt that ACS was trying to re-write copyright law with this clause by requiring lending libraries to take on the responsibilities of borrowers. This clause also raises many issues regarding privacy of library records, and the library was advised by the university legal counsel that it may be illegal to cede to an outside vendor the right to audit state records. The University refused to sign a license containing this language, so ACS relented and a new, less-objectionable clause replaced the original one:
"Licensee will follow current ILL guidelines under the National InterLibrary Loan Code and the CONTU guidelines on Fair Use. The ACS reserves the right to request the number of electronic ILL requests transacted for ACS Web Editions over a prescribed period of time during normal business hours and with reasonable notice."
The Health Sciences Library is working with other libraries at the University of Virginia to develop a License database that will track all licenses that university libraries have agreed to. This was developed to help prevent duplication of license negotiations amongst the many libraries at the university. Whether you are part of a large library system, or an individual library, keeping good records of licensing agreements you are participating in is highly recommended.
Getting back to our Tale of the Letter, after navigating through all the legal jargon and fine print contained in the licensing agreement for this "free" journal, perhaps your first impression of the benevolent publisher is fading away or changing altogether . . . [SLIDE: image of Mother Theresa fades into image of a great white shark]
While the licensing of electronic journals can sometimes be a daunting task, there are many resources available to help you with the process. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation maintains a web site (http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/index.html) with many helpful resources, including some excellent model licenses and licensing documents. LIBLICENSE-L, an electronic mailing list for licensing digital information, also maintains this excellent resource page (http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml) .
Once E-journals have been acquired, or licensed, the librarian continues to play an important role in providing efficient access to these resources. Unlike a print journal, which you can display on a shelf, how do you best present the E-journal to your users? There are many options available, including maintaining a web list linking users directly to titles, or incorporating E-journal URLs into your online catalog records. Both of these can be time-consuming tasks, so seeking out ways to automate these processes are a high priority for librarians.
Also worth considering are a number of commercial vendor sites which act a aggregators of E-journal collections, such as High Wire Press (http://intl.highwire.org/) , or Journals@Ovid (http:// www.ovid.com) . Both of these sites offer the added value of being able to perform key-word or controlled subject-heading searches across a collection of E-journals and provide article-level links to the user.
As librarians were in the forefront of introducing health care professionals to the mysteries and joys of MEDLINE searching, I think we also have an opportunity to be proactive agents of change in the transition from print to electronic journals. The explosion in information services spawned by the emergence of the Web has created an exciting time for libraries and the entire information community. Not only will most journals be available electronically in the coming years, but they will be available in ways much more dynamic than today's "print on the screen" model. Whether it be imbedded software applets, video snippets, chemical modeling, or mechanical simulations, the journal of the near future will be a rich information experience. Yet for all the technological possibilities, the basic needs of the researcher and the role the library plays in meeting these needs remains strikingly consistent. There is little doubt that the new millennium will bring even bigger waves of change for libraries and librarians. But rather than be washed out to sea by the tides of change, let's grab our surfboards and ride those waves into an exciting future.
References
One giant leap, one small step: continuing the migration to electronic journals (Resource Sharing in a Changing Environment) by John H. Barnes Library Trends, Winter 1997 v45 n3 p404.