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Science Team Meeting Minutes
23 January 2001

Attendees:  Mary Ochs, Mary Patterson, John Saylor, Marty Schlabach, Leah Solla, Pat Viele, Phil Davis, Linda Stewart, David Brumberg, Suzanne Whitaker, Steve Rockey.

  1. Springer News:  Mary Ochs reported that Springer will be un-bundling their print/electronic journals next year. From what we know now, we have one more year of “free” electronic with print.

  2. Journal Citation Report [JCR]:  Phil Davis reported that Michael Engle is spear-heading the effort to get a trial of this database. No copy of JCR for the Social Sciences exists on this campus. The cost of the electronic version is about 10X the cost of the paper version. One copy of the CD version might be a good compromise.

    Points to consider during negotiations:

    This will be presented to the Database Review Committee as a possible candidate for 519 funding.

  3. BIOSIS/CAB/Agricola:  Mary Ochs, Phil Davis, Holly Mistlebauer and Angi Faiks are looking at ways of developing or purchasing a web interface for locally mounted database tapes. The Medical College library currently does not have BIOSIS at all.

  4. Highwire Press:  Phil Davis distributed the summary of a survey conducted by Highwire. They offer about 170 journals “free” electronically with the print subscription. Cornell has about half of our total possible journals activated. A few of them are also available electronically other ways, i.e. Catchword and ProQuest. Most of us are on an email list which notifies us of changes in subscription status.

  5. Needed Materials: Ross Atkinson would like information about materials that we feel we should have, but cannot afford. Please put together your list and send it to Mary Ochs by January 30. She will forward the total list to Ross on the 31st. Ross and Sarah are looking at how the Library's purchasing power has declined over time, resulting in an inability to purchase some items that students and faculty need.

  6. Table of Contents Service [TOC]:  Mann has extended their contract with Uncover for one more year. Greg Lawrence is working on the negotiations with ISI to use their table of contents service. Mann has identified about 300 titles for which they would like TOC. The minimum is 500 titles. If there are titles you would like to add, send the list, along with a letter of interest to Greg Lawrence by February 28. The cost is $12/title/year for any number of subscribers. The $12/title/year fee will be covered by the library subscribing to that title. Mary will send the list of available titles to the Science team list.

    John will look at the possibility of this fitting into MyUpdates or MyLibrary.

  7. Elsevier:  John will ask Marty Kurth about the status of cataloging the Elsevier titles and send info to SciTeam. John is monitoring the transaction allowance from Elsevier. Our ending balance is still high, but many patrons are not aware of the availability of these electronic journals.

    SciTeam agreed to allow the Math and Phys Sci Libs to cancel all of the Elsevier titles that Cornell is allowed to cancel in 2002. We need to know the amount of this allowance. The items that we intend to cut in 2002 should be included in the note to Ross. John will get this figure from Elsevier.

    Elsevier and Academic will un-package their journal subscriptions, allowing title-by-title selection. The NERL package deal will probably still be better. The better price through NERL has negative implications for individual LOCAL budgets, however. We will investigate all options, as they are publicized.

    Harcourt Press asked Academic not to bundle their titles. Their titles, many of which are medical, are now available on a title-by-title basis.

    Elsevier has attempted to index science content on the web. Scirus is a free web site: http://www.scirus.com/. Bill Arms refers to this site as “yahoo for science”.

    Elsevier will eliminate the platform fee.

    Elsevier will also be mounting large backfiles of titles. Fee structure TBA. Chemistry is the first subject.

    We are anxious to get the Elsevier titles into the Gateway. The records have been imported, but they lack description paragraphs. It is the policy not to add records without description. John will ask Marty about the possibility of making this an exception. John and Phil will recommend to ERC that the Elsevier titles go in without the description.

  8. Taylor and Francis:  Catchword may have merged the title lists for Cornell and Cornell Medical. The publishers want two accounts. Phil will follow up with Ed Zieba on this.

  9. Books in Print and Ulrich’s:  Mary arranged for a one-week trial for Books in Print and Ulrich’s. She will try to get the trial extended and distribute the passwords.

  10. Comprehensive Composite Materials:  John has arranged for a trial of Comprehensive Composite Materials.

Announcements:

On February 22, Phil Davis is planning to attend a workshop in Albany. “Issues and Trends Affecting the Future of Scholarly Journals and Scientific Communication.”

Mary Ochs noted that Yankee Books is working on an e-books system. She expressed interest in participating in the beta test.

Pat Viele announced the AIP will soon have statistics available.

Suzanne Cohen is the chair of a sub-committee regarding 519 fund statistics.

We will continue to meet on the second Friday of the month from 9-10:30AM for this semester.

Next meeting will be February 9. The topic of discussion is statistics. What do we want to measure? How will we use the statistics?

John suggested adding another column to the “publishers” web page. The URL for the statistics page provided by the publisher would go there.

Minutes recorded by Pat Viele


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