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

Scribe: Mary Ochs

Nature Online: after a brief discussion, we decided to NOT to go with the current deal due to the cost, which would be about $8,000 and the 3 month lag time for news and letters to the editors. The articles appear much sooner, but the news and letters features are very important.

Nature Reviews:

• Individual subscribers have free online access
• A print copy comes with the online subscription, but not the other way around
• Mark Funk plans to buy these in paper. He feels the online is too expensive.
• Mann is planning to ask faculty to evaluate these publications. Are they any better than other similar publications?
• Suzanne has had a request for Nature Reviews in Genetics.
• It was noted that biochemistry and neurology are both priority areas for research at the medical school and at the Ithaca campus.

Blackwell Science: Phil reported on his conversations with our sales rep Jason Miller.

• 5% cancellation clause
• Phil will verify which titles Cornell actually subscribes to
• The Ithaca campus and the Geneva campus are considered one entity. Cost is approximately $3900 for access to over 270 titles. The medical school is considered separate from Ithaca, making Cornell 1.5 sites. Payment: Mann will pay 60% [which includes 10% for PSL this year], Vet will pay 20%, and PSL, Geneva and Engineering will each pay 10%. This payment structure will be re-examined for 2002. The Medical college will pay their $1950.
• The list of titles available is a “moving target”. The total was over 270 two weeks ago with additional titles to come.
• Each title will vary in terms of how many years we will be able to access electronically.
• Phil will compile an accurate list of CU subscriptions and send it to John Saylor. John will then forward the list to Marty Kurth. We will request that the aggregator be cataloged right awayindividual titles later.
• If you have a Blackwell Science title through OCLC ECO, be sure to cancel it.

Annual Reviews: Phil has worked out a deal with Annual Reviews that would allow us access to all of our Annual Reviews titles with electronic access. The best deal requires that each library pay for its own paper subscription and then we will ask DRC for central funding of the electronic version. For 2002 we plan to go to a direct subscription with Annual Reviews (rather than through a vendor) resulting in modest savings. [~$50]

• Med not included in this deal, they pay separately.
• Possible to cancel duplicates of paper subscriptions
• Possible to opt for electronic only

General comment: in a year’s time, judging by the number of inquiries from patrons, primary access for many patrons has switched from paper to electronic for many items.

JSTOR subject collections: the JSTOR special collection for botany and ecology has become available. The cost is $4500 for the 29 core titles in these fields. We will make a case for central funding for this special collection. There is also a one time start-up fee of $4500.

SciFinder Scholar: [Leah]

• CAS Student edition is a very small subset of chemical abstracts. [only about 250 titles]. Many of these journals are indexed in Science Citation and/or Periodical Abstracts. The cost of CAS Student Edition is only about $3900, but we have access to a more complete product. Several team members recommended that the DRC consider cancelling Chem Abs Student Edition
• CAS is working on a web version of SciFinder, but they feel that the web is not robust enough as yet to handle chemical abstracts

Table of Contents Service: [Mary Ochs]

• CARL only allows us to purchase about 350 titles, so the service could not be opened to all of CUL without switching to ISI
• There is a minimum purchase of 500 titles at $12/title/year. This is also on the agenda for the Social Sciences Team and the Humanities Team for this month.
• It is currently not possible to link directly from the table of contents to the article, but links to the journal issue should be available soon.
• We already have Current Contents. Is this a duplication? The Alerts Service within Current contents is limited to 200 users.
• General comment: the pricing model of charging per title rather than number of potential users is unusual.
• Would it be more efficient to hire a programmer to make a library web page linking users directly to publishers e-journal web pages? Most of them offer free TOC services.
• Customized service may be coming along with MyLibrary. This might be one way for the library to add value selecting TOC according to users’ profile.
• There was no clear consensus. This issue needs further discussion.

E-books: [John]

• Greg Lawrence is chair of the E-book committee appointed by Ross.
• CU is going to try IT Knowledge e-books for one year through NYLINK. This will cost about $6,000 shared by Engineering, Mann and central fund.
• CU will continue with NetLibrary with the consortium. We will put in $10,000 in addition to the $20,000 already spent.
• NetLibrary records are being added to our catalog.
• If 2 patrons use the publication, we buy it.
• Questia.com offers access to 150,000 social sciences and humanities documents. It is individual subscriptions only. It costs $30/month. John suggested that some of us sign up as individuals for the trial.
• Greg Lawrence is experimenting with e-book “readers” both hardware and software
• Faculty are already asking about downloading the most recent issue of a serial to take home to read. Is this a copyright violation?
• Electronic serials are not very “browse-able”.

Science Direct: [John]

• There is concern about the transaction allowance. Elsevier does not seem to have an accurate list of NERL subscriptions, so how can they accurately bill us for transactions involving titles that no one in NERL has?

  We may be able to use the token system to adjust our subscriptions: i.e. cancel a low use title to which we subscribe and subscribe to one for which we have had to use tokens.

General comments:

• We need to really push publishers to give us accurate subscription lists.
• Will the number of new journals being offered decrease? It is easy to make the decision to not subscribe to a new title in paper, when we know it will be available electronically as part of a consortial package.
• Patrons seem to be able to cope with HTML and PDF versions of articles online, but DVI and PostScript versions are not popular.
• Elsevier is providing access to Cell Press journals. We need to investigate further.
• It is getting more and more difficult to maintain the accuracy of catalog records as publishers are being bought out and titles change to new aggregations.
• For next time: the publishers page will need to be broader now that the social sciences and humanities journals are becoming available online also. The site is currently on the Engineering web page, but it may need to go central.
• http://www.englib.cornell.edu/electronic-resources/journals/publishers.html

CUL Staff Web Site | Committee Index | Science Selection Team Index

02/28/02 vwb