Science Team Meeting

September 24, 1999

Attending: Linda Stewart, Jean Poland, David Brumberg, John Saylor, Steve Rockey, Mark Funk (via telephone), and Mary Ochs (recorder)

1. We agreed that Mary will take minutes for the meetings and send them to the Science Team list for review. John will then post them to CU-Lib.

2. John distributed copies of the Engineering Library's web page "Science Publishers of Electronic Journals.http://www.englib.cornell.edu/electronic-resources/journals/publishers.html We agreed to add to this page, and publicize it as a resource for reference staff who need information about access to e-jounals. Science team members will send John information about important packages that are not currently on the list. Individual team members may volunteer for or be assigned the role of "champion or monitor" for specific e-journal packages.

3. E-Journal packages

   1. Springer -- NERL is evaluating a "deal" to get access to all of the Springer titles. This would be approximately 100 additional journals. John will get a list of the journals we do not currently own to see if we want to pursue this further. This is a table showing what we do subscribe to (as of a year ago) http://www.englib.cornell.edu/cul/science_team/culspringer.html It will be updated and reformatted

   2. Wiley no longer requires individual passwords to access their journals. John will talk with Wiley. We currently do not have the Wiley journals cataloged for the Gateway because of the password limitation. We will catalog the journals if we can get around the password issue.

   3. Kluwer -- Kluwer will allow us to pick and choose individual journals. Their price is 20% above the cost of the paper, although this would be reduced ( to ~15%) if we subscribed to a large number of Kluwer titles. We could also get access to the Kluwer titles through OCLC ECO, which would provide guaranteed archival access. We will continue to investigate Kluwer journals.

   4. Blackwell -- Scott Wicks is currently working on the subscription to the selected Life Sciences/Geological Sciences titles from Blackwell. We need to be sure to establish electronic access to these journals asap so that the print Blackwell titles cancelled for Geneva (as of Jan. 2000) are available electronically. NERL has presented a Blackwell "deal" for 2000. However, the team decided that we should continue to pursue the OCLC ECO version of Blackwell for the coming year, with the possibility of switching over to NERL if it becomes a real option.

   5. Elsevier -- Elsevier will provide free access to a rolling 9 months of most of their titles. The service will be known as WEb Editions, and will provide a rolling 9 month archive of all Elsevier Journals (except trends, current opinions, cell press, and maybe one other). This will officially start in October, and all we need to do is activate the "Web Editions Agreement" which the elesevier Representative will send to John within the next week or so.

      Then John will turn it over to Scott. Individual titles we have available now (Phsyica A-E, etc) have all been part of a test.

      We also currently have a 3-month NERL trial of the "top 100" Elsevier journals mounted locally at Yale. The url is: http://temp-copy2.its.yale.edu:8080

      We will encourage Science Team members and reference staff to take a look at both of these systems.

      Things to think about (from NERL): What kinds of issues and aspects you want to explore during our three months? Who do you want to open the test to (within your own institutions), and how much publicity and caveats do you want to indulge in? What information (financial and otherwise) do you need in order to make a decision about a NERL action on Elsevier Science Direct Onsite, and specifically which titles would you want via this option if you buy-in?

      John will continue to gather information on Elsevier's pricing and services. When the new bibliographer starts at Mann, Mary will ask him/her to monitor the Elsevier e-journal situation.

   6. ACS journals -- Jean Poland reported that the representative from ACS was here at Cornell on Wednesday, Sept. 22. She will send us a proposal for getting campus-wide access to all of the ACS journals. They are willing to include the Medical College and Geneva in the license agreement. There current pricing is 15% above the print costs. This appears to be a turnaround from previous difficult licensing agreements and high pricing. It looks like we should be able to get these journals.

   7. Dialog@CARL -- The new Dialog@CARL system available through the NYS Library includes access to Science Online. The price quote we have for Science Online is $5000 for campus-wide access. We will hold off purchasing Science Online until we see if Dialog@CARL provides adequate access.

   8. Nature -- John talked with representative at Nature who said they working on their institutional subscription guidelines. Mark said that the Medical Library has Nature available and is scripting passwords for using it. Mary will talk with Gateway technical staff to see what is possible.

   9. Vendor-based E-journal packages (Highwire, OCLC ECO, SwetsNet, etc.) -- We delayed discussion of these for our next meeting.

   10. Cambridge University Press -- We are experiencing problems with accesss to the CUP journals. CUP is having server problems, and we are experiencing IP checking problems. John and Scott are working on it.

4. Linda suggested that we should discuss the possibility of monitoring the usage of our electronic journals, and try also to measure the impact on use of print journals. She will put this on the agenda for a future Science Team meeting and lead the discussion.

5. Current Contents -- Susan Barnes is setting up a trial of CC in October. Partial funding for this year's subscription would come from Vet and the Medical College. Other libraries would have to pool money to have enough for the $24,000 subscription cost. Current Contents is already under consideration by the DRC for central funding, but not until next year. CARL's current awareness service is also an option. It's price tag is even higher, however, at $50,000. Mark will investigate whether he currently gets SDI services from his current provider of current awareness. Susan Barnes is checking on the cost of SDI from Current Contents. Evaluation of CC will continue.

6. SciFinder Scholar is now available, but is not on the Gateway yet because of issues with the client software.

7. Our next meeting will be Friday, Oct. 8 at 9:00 at the Math Library.

Minutes recorded by John M. Saylor .

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