Peter Scott's Library Blog directed me to the Research Information Network (RIN) report E-journals: their use, value and impact which looked at how researchers use ejournals and the impact and value to intitutions and the contribution e-journals make to research productivity, quality and outcomes.

According to Peter, many surveys have been done on how much researchers welcome access to online journals but until now there hasn't been an evidence based study giving a detailed potrait of the information seeking behavior, usage of online journals, and benefits of that use.

This report examined the log files from journal websites and data from libraries in ten universities and research institions in the UK.


The full report is available here:

E-journals_use_value_impact_April2009.pdf 2.09 MB
Aims_scope_methods_context_CIBER_ejournals_working_paper.pdf 490.02 KB
Journal_spending_use_outcomes_CIBER_ejournals_working_paper.pdf 1.44 MB
Bibliometric_indicators_CIBER_ejournals_working_paper.pdf 254.68 KB
Information_usage_behaviour_CIBER_ejournals_working_paper.pdf 1022.12 KB



I am still going through the report but here are some bits of information that I found interesting or bears repeating.

• E-journals are used HEAVILY - The 13 yr old me that wants to say, "Duh we know that already." But I think this important to repeat because I have had conversations with librarians who don't think anybody is going to use the electronic journals. This report stated in four months the users of the 10 institutions visited nearly 1,400 ScienceDirect journals half a million times and viewed 1.5 million pages! This type of usage isn't limited to ScienceDirect. Users accessed Oxford Journals over 750,000 times and viewed over 600,000 pages in a year.
• The vast majority of users get access to journals from third party sites such as PubMed and stay long enough just to download the full text. I think this is extremely important information for libraries and journal publishers. Libraries need to make sure their link resolvers and the PubMed linkouts are working correctly and publishers need to make sure they make it easy for third party sites to access their journals. LWW titles come to mind. If people are searching on Google or Google Scholar they are never going to hit the full text of an LWW title in Ovid.
• Users are accessing the journals during non-working hours. Nearly a quarter of ScienceDirect use occured "outside the traditional 9-5 working day." Weekend use accounted for 15% of total use.
• Google is a major player. Once journal content is opened up to Google for indexing, Google is then used by large numbers. Four months after ScienceDirect opened physics content to Google, more than a third of the traffic came from Google. Google popularity and usage further illustrated with Oxford Journals. Oxford Journals have been open to Google for quite a while and over half of their traffic comes from Google.

It is a very interesting report. I can't wait until I am finished reading all of it.

Labels: Publishing Industry, Technology

Yesterday I attended my first meeting with the New England Journal of Medicine Library Advisory Board and it was very interesting. We discussed a lot of issues such as the future of medical journals, libraries, technology, and users/readers.
One of the more interesting discussions centered around the future and the transition of libraries becoming more than just repositories holding books and journals (printed matter) and the transition of journals to something more than just the printed hard copy.
This transition has been happening for some time but the economy and tightening of budgets has expedited this process. It has forced all of us to evaluate our ideas about our purchases, services, and roles. Do we really want buy print journals anymore when it costs so much in personnel time and salary to check them in, process them, and claim them. There is also the cost of binding and the cost of housing them. Keeping them on your shelves has a cost, because that space could always be put to use in other and possibly better ways. Printed material isn't the only resource facing scrutiny, databases, ILS, and other online resources must prove their worth as our role changes. Questions like, "Why are we paying for $ a database when we can get it free or cheaper from another company," are taken seriously. One librarian made the comment that libraries that have focused on and built themselves as large repositories could possibly have a lot of problems coming. Because the focus is turning away from the resources within the library and turning even more to the amount and the type of user services provided. Librarians have always provided services, but outreach is even more important now. Services gets you out of your library, gets you and your library noticed and better illustrates your value to the institution than a collection of books, journals and databases does. As libraries begin to increase the type and number of services they still need some resources. But librarians are now more focused on what resources support their services in the most economical way. This might mean that certain sacred cow resources and collections might be cut to keep other more useful or profitable resources.
Obviously this impacts vendors considerably, those hurt by the economy as well as those who have made profits despite the down turn. Just like the large repository institutions facing some very tough issues, I have got to think that the larger vendors are going to be in for some interesting times. Elsevier, Springer, Wolters Kluwer, EBSCO, etc. all are fairly big companies within publishing and library world. They each have various diverse subsidiaries. For example, did you know EBSCO also makes fishing lures? Some vendors have other non library and publishing interests, such as EBSCO, others do not.
There are vendors that are not as diverse and are still very heavy in the publishing and library world. These companies may find themselves in the same boat as libraries. This might get especially interesting when the subdivisions or subsidiaries of the parent company do not communicate. If they don't communicate well then they may not have created a plan as to how the subsidiaries can work together instead of against each other. For example, a significant increase in journal prices might not only cause a library to cut journal subscriptions but it might also impact the textbook division because the library may not also buy as many textbooks in order to afford the journals they didn't cut.
This happens with the purchase of databases. If a needed database becomes too expensive yet is critical to the mission of the library/institution the library usually offsets these costs by cutting other databases, journals, and textbooks. For example, if EBSCO significantly raised the price of CINAHL (which cannot be purchased elsewhere), many libraries who need CINAHL may end up cutting their journal titles (which would impact EBSCO if they were also that library's subscription agent) or quite possibly drop full text Medline in lieu of PubMed.
We are sort of used to seeing this happen with journal collections. For example, if you decide to purchase the online full text of LWW titles and cancel the print, it will cost more to get the online title. If you subscribe to a publisher's collection of titles you might be able to drop a few titles but you are obligated to spend the same amount of money on titles, essentially switching out or trading or titles. However, this method is viewed more as punitive measure among libraries and a preventive measure within the subsidiary, it usually only helps that division not the whole company.
Times could be difficult for these big companies. The reason I think this is that many libraries have already made quite extensive cuts in publications. The scuttlebutt around the library world is that libraries will be faced with even more budget cuts next year and quite possibly into 2011. Three years worth of cuts makes me think that nothing will be safe.
Therefore it is probably more essential than ever that large library vendors with subsidiaries increase their communication and partnership efforts so that they can work together. Because if one division increases their prices significantly they could be cutting the nose off despite the face of the overall company. Yeah that division is pulling down big profits but the other divisions suffer and the overall company suffers. When large companies buy out competitors and assimilate them, there will be some growing pains and communications issues. Once the dust has settled some companies have done a better job than others at communication, letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Some companies have not done so well and the subsidiaries appear to be completely independent of the larger corporation. These are the companies that will have problems.
Of course this is just all just my own speculation generated by a very interesting discussion about the economy speeding up the transformation libraries and journals. The examples I provided were just examples showing how almost everything is tied together. How the price a company's product can impact and directly influence (consciously or unconsciously) whether their other products are bought or cut. In this economy it is essential that we all investigate options.

Labels: Databases, Hospital Libraries, Publishing Industry, Technology

There was an interesting post on LIBLICENSE-L yesterday, apparently many authors are unaware of their rights with publishers. The authors tend to believe the publishers' agreements are a lot more restrictive than they really are. Publishers' agreements are more liberal than authors are aware of, but the agreements do not allow self archiving of the published PDF.
According to series of reports (listed at the end of this post) the majority of publishers' agreements allow authors of the articles to provide copies to colleagues, to incorporate them into their own works, to post them to a personal or departmental website or to an institutional repository, and to use them in course packs. Yet many authors don't think they can do any of these things when if fact many are allowed to do so.
The PDF is what people and authors want. Again, publishers' agreements exceeded author expectations regarding the PDF and copies to colleagues, incorporation into their own works, and usage in course packs. However, many authors (more than half) think publishers' agreements allow them to deposit the final PDF for self archiving. In reality less than 10% of publishers allow this.
So why is there such poor understanding of the agreements among authors? The PRC concludes that publishers need to do much more to clarify the terms of their agreements. However PRC also believes that certain terminology like "preprint" may be misleading to authors and the term should be dropped for the standard NISO terminology.

• Full report: Sally Morris, Journal Authors' Rights:perception and reality (PRC Summary Paper 5), PRC 2009 (PDF) http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/JournalAuthorsRights.pdf
• Summary of findings: Journal Authors' Rights: perception and reality - a preliminary report, PRC 2009 (PPT) http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/SummaryforAPE-final.ppt
• Author survey summary: Author Rights Copyright Project, GfK Business 2008 (PPT) http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/PRC2008v2.ppt
• John & Laura Cox, Publishing Practice 3, ALPSP 2008(PDF) http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id=200
• Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group, NISO l 2008 (PDF) http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-8-2008.pdf

So why are publishers' agreements as clear as mud to most authors? I decided to look at Elsevier's Authors Home. (I picked Elsevier because they were the first publisher who came to mind.) I clicked on Authors' Rights, then "What rights do I retain as an author?" A lot of the information about what an author can and can't do is stated pretty clearly. I agree it gets a little confusing regarding "pre-print" version and "the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article." But, for the most part the authors' rights are stated fairly clearly. This makes me wonder whether authors even read these agreements? And perhaps the reason for poor understanding of their rights is a result of the authors' failure to read the agreements in the first place.

When we travel by plane we all hear the flight attendant giving the safety demonstration. How many well traveled passengers tune out thinking they know everything? How many published authors tune out when it comes to their rights?

Labels: Publishing Industry

Last week Alison Aldrich at the Dragonfly posted a really helpful article on RSS and different delivery methods. She mentions how you can use RSS feeds to assemble PDF newsletters, email alerts, and to listen from podcasts on your regular cell phone.

Labels: Podcasting, Publishing Industry, RSS feeds, Technology

Finding a table of contents alert service as been a small ongoing personal project of mine. I still have yet to find a product on the market that does a good job. The most recent to hit the Internet is ticTocs. ticTocs is a free, easy to use site that researchers can use to keep up to date with their favorite journals' table of contents. There are 12,272 TOCs from 436 publishers linking to 333,977 articles. The TOC feeds can be read in your favorite feed reader.

Sounds great right? I decided to give it a try. ticTocs mentions that in order to get the full text of an article users must either have a personal or institutional subscription. I wanted to see how it handled accessing the full text of an article using an institutional subscription. Why did I do this? Most researchers subscribe to a few core journals, but they want the table of contents to more than just those few that they personally subscribe to. They want the table of contents and the full text to those articles. So any table of contents program really needs to figure out how to address people accessing the full text through an institutional subscription. ticTocs does not do this. They just link to the publishers' site. This works well for some journals, but for journals that have publishers like Lippincott Williams and Wilkins this is a problem. LWW titles are only available to institutions through Ovid, not through the the Lippincott site. Linking only to the publisher's site also does not address the myriad other ways institutions access full text articles, such as institutionally subscribed databases.

If a majority of a user's institutional online journal subscriptions come directly from the publishers' sites then they will be pleased with ticTocs. (Unless they are trying to access Lippincott titles. Come on Lippincott get with the program. Forcing institutions to access the full text through Ovid is inefficient and reflects poorly on your product.) However, if a user wants the TOC to one of the many other medical journals that are available through the institutions full text databases, then they are going to be dissatisfied.

I keep telling people that this is an area for some database company like EBSCO or Ovid to hit upon. All they have to do is create a method to see the current TOCs for journals indexed in MEDLINE, a library's link resolver would direct the users to the correct method of full text access. Just because I mentioned database companies doesn't mean the link resolver companies couldn't do this as well. Who knows perhaps a programming librarian could create a neat little customizable mashup that would work effectively.

Until then I will just keep looking for an easy method of accessing the TOCs and the full text articles.

Labels: Publishing Industry, RSS feeds, Technology

Wednesday I co-presented with Allan Cho on mashups in the biomedical library communities at the Association of American Publishers 2009 PSP Pre-Conference. I also had the fortune to sit in and listen to a variety of interesting other presentations. One of the neatest presentations I listened to was on Interactive Science Publishing.
What is Interactive Science Publishing? Think of it as the PDF on steroids. Currently traditional PDF articles aren't that different from the print. It may have links within the article (example: links to articles in the refrence section) but in general it is the same ol' article.

Enter the interactive article.
Imagine having the "PDF" of an article on congenital heart defects and be able to hear the heart sounds plus the video recording of the heart. The video would be more than just a snippet, it would be the entire video sectioned into "chapters" refrenced within the various areas of the article. So while you are reading the article you can click on the link within the text referencing the image, sound, etc. and the image immediately jumps to that section the video. Imagine the data behind a large randomized control trial available in its entirety to all readers to be manpulated, reused, and viewed.


Two different people presented on this new online journal structure. The first person, George Thoma, described the program they created which was one of ten semi-finalists in Elsevier's Article 2.0 contest. The second person John Childs, spoke of OSA's product which was developed in cooperation with the National Library of Medicine. Both products were very similar and very impressive. Currently you must download OSA's free software to view their interactive journals. The have already published several articles in this fashion in OSA journals currently indexed in MEDLINE. If you can't download and install software at your work computer, it is definitely worth trying at home just to get an idea of the all the possibilities and ways an article (and all the data, video, images, etc. behind it) can be viewed and used by readers.


While this type of interactive article is still a little ways away, it is jaw dropping at how the simple paper article can and will become so much more in the future. With all of the possibilities and opportunities this type of article presents, there still some questions to be answered.


There probably needs to be one standard for this new technology to become adopted. Readers are not going to want to download one type of reader to view one publisher's articles and another reader for a different publisher's articles. This is equally true for the submission of articles. Authors are not going to want to try and use multiple programs to submit their articles, data, and images. Changes regarding data sharing also must occur within the biomedical community. In the physics and mathmatical science world, researchers frequently share their data and use other people's data. Not so in the biomedical world, researchers closely guard their data because it is the ticket to their next grant funding. Sharing of biomedical research data would not only help research to grow at a faster and more productive pace, it will also help find those fraudulent researchers who expertly fake their data and publish their results in well know journals like Lancet. Having the data available for the world to look at and go through opens the research to another level of vetting that the actual peer reviewers might not catch.

Libraries and library vendors also have quite a few issues to think about and deal with regarding these new interactive articles. First, how will interlibrary loan work? There will be so much important information within the article that is digital and not available by traditional PDF means, how will that information be shared. A researchers getting just the PDF without the data behind the article would be like getting an article with a few pages missing. How will full text database providers deal with the interactive article within their database? Will they have rights to the videos and data sets? How will they build whatever interactive article software viewer that becomes the standard into their database? Would they need to?

Another big question (one many librarians don't like to talk about) is, what are the implications to the printed journal? I used to think that the printed journal would still be around in some way and the libraries would always get the printed journal. That trend is already beginning to change with just the average vanilla electronic journal. Libraries more and more are dumping printed journals in favor of online access and online repositories. The interactive journal article would speed this process up considerably. A related question would be what would be the institutional subscription vs. personal subscription access implications. There are publishers who give personal subscribers different and more inclusive access to information compared to what institutional subscribers are allowed to access. Would things like all of the research data in the interactive article be only available to personal subscribers?

The interactive article is still too far in the future for any immediate answers, but these questions and others are ones that will need to be addressed, because technology has made it possible for this kind of journal article to exist. It is only a matter of time before it or something like it becomes a reality.

Labels: Publishing Industry, Technology

(from liblicense)

All journal titles formerly published by Haworth Press are now available at informaworld. This marks the first stage in migrating the ejournals from www.haworthpress.com to informaworld. Informaworld site that hosts journals, eBooks, abstract databases and reference works published by Taylor & Francis, Routledge, Psychology Press and Informa Healthcare.

Things You Need To Know in General:

• Taylor & Francis will be publishing these titles on a calendar year basis.
• All Haworth journal titles are available from informaworld.
• From this point, no new content with a 2009 volume year will be added to www.haworthpress.com, nor will any new accounts be created on the site
• The Haworth Press site will run in tandem with informaworld until 30th March 2009, after which date the Haworth Press site will be closed.

Things You Need To Know For Online Access:

• informaworld licensed access will be current content with a current subscription along with a backfile to 1997, where digitised.
• Older content will be available through Online Archive Packages
• Purchased content will be available in perpetuity.
• Online Access to Ceased Titles -informaworld plans to host ceased titles from Haworth Press. A list of these titles can be found at www.informaworld.com/uploads/haworth_ceased_merged_renamed.xls. (Users will need to claim online access to ceased titles by contacting support@informaworld.com.)
• In most cases, online access should be transferred automatically to your institution's informaworld account.
• It is advised that you to check your access thoroughly whilst they are dual hosting and report any anomalies to the informaworld support team at support@informaworld.com.
• Statistics -Currently the usage statistics on www.haworthpress.com are not COUNTER Compliant. Because the data is not compliant they do not plan to migrate the Haworth Press usage statistics to informaworld.
  Users wishing to access these statistics should download them from www.haworthpress.com before 30th March 2009.
• Link Resolvers -informaworld is working with the following link resolver intermediaries: Serials Solutions, Ex Libris, TD Net, Ebsco Industries A-Z, Goldrush and OCLC. Depending on their update schedules, Haworth content should feature in informaworld holdings during January for most providers.

Labels: Publishing Industry

Kindle is Amazon.com's e-book reader which according to various market reports has been flying off of Amazon’s shelves. Released November 2007 the first Kindles were sold out after five and half hours, even with $399 price tag. Kindle users can download content from Amazon.com's Kindle store and Amazon offers an service that converts HTML, Word docs, PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP to Kindle format (AZW). Audiobooks in MP3, Audible, and Audiobooks can be listened to on Kindle through USB or SD card.

Some libraries public libraries have already started circulating Kindles and there are some questions among the public library community about the legalities of circulating them. According to Rochelle Hartman Amazon.com customer service agents have provided contradictory information about loaning Kindles. While Drew Herdener, Amazon spokesman, told LJ that libraries could loan a Kindle without content is but sharing a device loaded with content "with a wide group of people would not be in line with the terms of use." Of course librarians are asking what constitutes "a wide group of people." Diane Lapsley, Assistant Director of Sparta Public Library has received no word from Amazon regarding the library loaning Kindles. The LJ article quotes Lapsely, "All we see ourselves doing is providing a great service—and advertising the heck out of their product."

So why does this matter to me the medical librarian? Well in last few weeks I have been running across some interesting blog posts, articles and other bits of information that mention the use of Kindles in the medical community.

John Halamka, CIO and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, mentions implementing Kindle support for all of their 20,000 educational resources and HMS on his blog, The Health Care Blog. You read that right, twenty thousand. Users enter their Kindle account into the MyCourses Kindle set page and can click on any "My Kindle" resource to sent to the device.

That is all fine and dandy but if the publishers have got to be on board, because if there isn't any medical content then there is going to be little use for them in a medical institution. The good news is, publishers are coming to Kindle. According to Inside Higher ED, Princeton University Press, Yale University Press, Oxford University Press, University of California Press are all publishing books available through Kindle. Additionally, CNET reports that Amazon is working on new models of to support the academic side of things.

Just browsing the medical subject section of the Kindle Store there are already quite a few books that are found in academic medical libraries and hospital libraries.

For example:

• First Aid for the USMLE Step 2 CK
• Pulmonary Physiology
• Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, Self-Assessment and Board Review
• Emergency Medicine Oral Board Review : Pearls of Wisdom
• Cardiac Surgery in the Adult
• Medical-Surgical Nursing Certification Exam Review : Pearls of Wisdom
• McGraw-Hill Manual of Laboratory and Diagnostic Tests
• Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics

Browse the Kindle Store for medical titles isn't the best. There are a lot of consumer health titles intermixed with medical texts and sometimes you have to watch out for the edition. While many of the titles appeared to be the most recent there are a few listed which have more current editions in print. For example Surgical Anatomy and Technique: A Pocket Manual, this Kindle book is for the 1994 edition, but the most recent version is actually the 2000 edition.

Of course at $399 a pop, plus the cost of the Kindle book, could be an awful pricey ebook model. Kindle is also a closed device. That means only Kindle books work on Kindles. So what does that mean to libraries who subscribe to various ebook collections through other vendors such as Ovid, Springer, Rittenhouse, Unbound Medicine? I don't know. My guess is that those couldn't be converted to be read on the Kindle. (Please anybody more familiar with ebook correct me if I am wrong or feel free to elaborate more.) Not only are the price and the format a possible barrier for adoption within medical libraries, there are some that believe Stanza and the iPhone might actually kill the Kindle.

A recent Forbes article reported the iPhone is more popular than Kindle and with the new Stanza application (freely available on Apple's iPhone Apps Store) is entering into Kindle's territory as a competing device. The iPhone App Store reports Stanza has been downloaded more than 395,000 time and is installed at a rate of 5,000 copies per day. The Forbes article reports that Citigroup estimates that Amazon will sell around 380,000 Kindles in 2008. Jane McEntegart on Tom's Guide thinks the growth of Stanza is due in part to iPhone's already strong popularity and the fact the iPhone is more versatile than Kindle. "For a start, the iPhone does the three things Apple feels everyone sees as a necessity: Phone, Internet, mp3 player. Phone calls, mobile browsing and music are all mandatory and any of the third party applications available from the App Store are extras you can add on if you want them. If you want Tetris, you can have Tetris, if you don’t, no one is going to try and sell it to you. The Kindle does one thing and some think that’s where it falls down."

Stanza and its books are currently free, which is another reason why you see so many downloads. Yours truly downloaded Stanza on to the sparkly new iPhone. Where Stanza falls for medical libraries is the book selection. Currently Stanza does not yet support books encumbered with Digital Rights Management. Most medical books are not free and have copyright and digital rights associated with them. According to the Forbes article Marc Prudhommeaux, Lexcycle chief executive, is working on deals with major publisher to provide newer ebooks for a fee. He claims, that once that happens the iPhone users will be able to shop, buy and read books just like they do with Kindle.

So what is a medical librarian to do? It is very confusing. But it is definitely something to keep an eye on and keep in the back of your brain. It has the potential to add another layer to ebooks.

Labels: Publishing Industry, Technology

BMJ is shifting the way they publish. BMJ intends for this to benefit readers and authors. Since July BMJ has been publishing content continuously on bmj.com. At first that sound like a no brainer, of course a major publisher will continually put their content online. But here is the issue, all of BMJ's articles will be "published online as they become ready, so bmj.com will update several times a day. Once published, articles will then be selected for a subsequent print issue."

This change is to speed up the process and help articles be published faster. According to BMJ, "Continuous publication also gives readers more flexibility in the way they engage with our content: as a continuous stream or in a weekly "package," or both. And it will allow us to tailor the print journal—which is read largely by UK readers—to their needs."

This change affects how articles will be organized and cited. From now on each article will have online one permanent citation and IT WILL NO LONGER DERIVE FROM PRINT. The citation will be year, volume, and e-locator (unique identifier for that article). The e-locator is what will appear in MEDLINE as well as other bibliographic indexes. Authors will need to need to use this information when citing a BMJ article, not the traditional method for citing articles with the year, volume, and page number.

I did a quick search on PubMed and here is a sample BMJ citation retrieved from PubMed.

Consensus statement on ovarian cancer aims to settle dispute over symptoms.
BMJ. 2008 Oct 7;337:a2007. doi: 10.1136/bmj.a2007. No abstract available.
PMID: 18840635 [PubMed - in process]

I am assuming since BMJ is continually publishing, there will be no "epub ahead of print" on BMJ citations.

Labels: Publishing Industry

Matthews Book Company and ebrary have joined together to distribute medical and allied health ebooks. Titles are available for purchase under a single or multi user access model. some of the titles include the following:

• Advancing Your Career: Concepts of Professional Nursing
• Mayo Clinic Concise Textbook of Medicine
• Molecular Targeting in Oncology
• Pharmacotherapy Principles and Practice

As of September 15, 2008, more than 11,000 e-book titles are supposed to be available through Matthews. Despite this, it does not appear Matthews and ebrary are ready for libraries to start purchasing e-books.

I went to the Matthews web site and unfortunately you can't browse the list of e-book titles. The only way you can see if something is available electronically is to search by title and if it comes up and says single user or multiple user then it is available electronically. (Example: Mayo Clinic Cardiology) Unfortunately when you click on the title for the single or multiple user version you get kicked back out to Matthews home page, so you have no idea about price or licensing.

According to the press release on ebrary's site, libraries will have the ability to purchase individual titles or subscribe to subject collections. Unfortunately I do not see where customers have that option. Their most recent title list for their Academic Medical Collection is from April 2008 (before the Matthews and ebrary joint venture).

I can't give you any details about pricing or licensing for individual titles or collections since neither Matthews nor ebrary decided to have information readily available on their websites despite going live with the project a week ago.

Electronic books are really becoming quite popular and I think consumer demand is slowly starting to rise. I am always interested in learning more about various electronic collections from different companies. It would be nice to have a specific link on Matthews web site just for the e-titles and collections. I think searching for the e-books individually through Matthews as one would typically search for a traditional print title is a poor search and retrieval method for e-books. It is additionally poor planning not to have the links to the e-books active. Dumping the person back to the main page does not encourage somebody to buy a title. I think ebrary should have updated their electronic textbook list with the additional titles and Matthews information. Their current (April 2008) list is just a PDF, it should not take that much time or effort to create the same type of PDF list.

I will keep ebrary and Matthews on my radar screen for now. Hopefully they will get their act together, update their sites and fix the ordering (i.e. when I click on e-book title, I go to the title not back to the main web page) and I can give you more information. If that occurs soon then I will write an update post.

Labels: Publishing Industry, Technology

My 18 month old son got a hold of my husband's cell phone. No surprise it was returned to us in three pieces. Our quest to find a new cell phone began. Shortly into the endeavor, we decided to look at various packages. Quickly we were on the slippery slope of cell phone, land line, DSL, and TV service bundling. I tried to compare apples to apples, a task easier said than done. After an hour of looking at various packages, bundles, and prices, it hit me. The communication industry and the publishing industry might be secretly run by the same people, because whole process reminded me of online journals.

Similar to Rollover Minutes, Fav 5, and Nights and Weekend plans, there is tiered pricing, institutional pricing, FTE pricing, number of beds pricing, etc. Both industries offer a dizzying variety of bundles and packages to try and get you to buy more. Trying to hook it all up to provide online access on campus as well as off campus not only requires some finesse but also requires you to read the fine print in the license agreements. According the fine print, Company A defines nights on the Nights and Weekend plan to start at 9:00pm while Company B defines nights starting 8:00pm unless you pay extra for nights to start at 7:00. Journal Publisher A defines a single location as one building, buildings next door are separate locations and more money. Journal Publish B defines a single location as any building within the same city limits as long as it does not have an independent administration. Like cell phone coverage, access to electronic journals varies with the publisher and can be unpredictable and spotty. Can it be accessible off campus? If so, via proxy, Athens, or password? Can you view all electronic content or is just some available? What about accessing epub ahead of print, back issues, videos, slides, podcasts, and meeting abstracts? God forbid if you have problems and need tech support or have a question about subscriptions. Just like the cable and phone company, journal customer support is less than stellar and their contact information is a mystery to find. If you do happen to reach a live person you better have your customer or account number ready because for some reason they don’t know what it is, can't find it, and won’t call up your information to help you. Usually problems are chalked up to user error, networking error, or failure to pay your bill (even though you did). Do they ever read the notes they type on their computers from your 60 help desk calls, or are the keyboard sounds you hear the result of them sending an email to a friend? Mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcy rear their ugly in head in both industries. AT&T bought Cingular but good luck trying to get their two systems and departments to talk and work together at all, let alone seamlessly. I have yet to figure out why on AT&T’s site I can log in and view my account under home phone and see my wireless account (originally Cingular) but I can’t log in to "view your wireless account" and view my wireless bill on the same AT&T site. LWW recently published three new Circulation specialty journals, but it is unknown whether those journals will be in Ovid’s LWW Total Access Package because they are working with the publisher on the rights to do so. Uh isn’t the publisher and Ovid within the same company? Wiley recently shook the hornet’s nest when they migrated recently acquired Blackwell Synergy to InterScience.

There is one difference between two, with journal publishers I don’t have to take off work and sit at home during a six hour window waiting for installation or repairs. Perhaps it is all a coincidence. But I choose to believe it is a conspiracy, one big secret organization hell bent on causing us to go insane and create havoc with human productivity. The same secret organization might also include those ever efficient and popular insurance companies. Ok, there maybe some of you that might say I am paranoid, but I know, "The Truth is Out There."

Labels: Humor, Publishing Industry, Technology