Electronic Journals-It's not as simple as it seems 1
The World Wide Web makes getting information easy. Jumping from one web site to another is so effortless that we do stream of consciousness clicking. We start out from one point and enter another, often without realizing we have left the original site. This leads to misconceptions about where we are getting the information and sometimes to the idea that most information is freely available to everyone.
We Pay for Campus Access
Take, for example, a PubMed search you run in your Weill Cornell office. When you get to a good citation on your topic, you see an icon saying "Full-text article at www... ." You click on it and successfully get to the full article. Is that because it is free to the world? Sometimes, but not often. Most of the time, the Library paid an institutional fee for that access.
It looks Free, But Is It?
Among the requests we get are purchasing suggestions. Frequently they are requests for the purchase of specific electronic journals or suites of journals from a publisher. In the past few years, many observant users have informed us of free versions of online materials implying that we may cancel our print subscriptions and redirect our budget toward other titles. When we check out the facts, most of the time free access is an illusion. Because most publishers use Internet Protocol (IP) authentication for identifying valid users, any campus computer is allowed to access registered Library journals. The journal appears free because the information is accessible to the WMC community due to the library subscription.
Case in Point: BioMedNet & Science Direct Subscriptions
BioMedNet is a free web site for biological medical researchers. Within it, however, are links to expensive full-text journals. When entering this site from a WMC computer, users can open up full-text articles to most titles. One reason for this access is the ScienceDirect subscription we share with Cornell University Library-Ithaca. As a result, 462 biomedical Elsevier subscriptions held by at least one of the participating libraries is accessible from both of our libraries. When a subscribed title is clicked, the product seamlessly links to our registered ScienceDirect site.
Libraries Are Customers Too
Highwire Press is well known by the biomedical community for putting print journals on the web. When the Library registers for electronic full-text access to journals along with our institutional print subscriptions, our name is linked to those publishers' pages. Unfortunately, our institution is listed as well on Highwire journals for which we do not have full-text rights. When the publisher assigns the Library a customer number it is attributed to all of their publications. However, we only have full-text rights to the titles for which we pay. This frequently causes confusion for libraries and users.
It Was Free Yesterday
An increasing problem is the suspension of electronic journal access by some publishers who had been providing it free with paid institutional print subscriptions. Restoring electronic access can be a minimum ten percent increase in cost for some titles. Some publishers are setting site license rates at many times the cost of the institutional print subscription for titles that charged no additional fee for electronic access in previous years. This happened on March 1st of this year with the journal, Nature, when the publisher suspended the single-user password system for institutions. Although they have since changed their licensing requirements, this served as an example of what can and does happen with electronic journals.
Free Access Can Be Time-Dependent
Compounding the confusion and frustration, publishers are responding to free access issues in a variety of ways. For example, many Highwire Press publishers allow truly free access to their journals after a given time. Suppose a user gets into a year 2000 full-text journal article from his WMC office. He/she tries to get into the same journal title for 2001 and is denied access. This is usually because of an unsubscribed journal's electronic embargo on recently published material. Another approach is to offer current year only free. Academic Press made three of its biomedical journals free for 2001, but no past years are free. Many other publishers provide full-text articles, sample, and special issues randomly, while the full content of their online publications are accessible with a paid subscription only.
We are Stewards
Library print subscriptions offer guaranteed access to the recent and distant past. Most online publishers either are not archiving or struggling with providing it. The Library applies print and electronic use statistics, national trends, citation patterns, and the institutional mission statement to our purchasing decisions. We welcome Library suggestions because they show evidence of needs we would not recognize in other ways. Sometimes they identify collection needs and sometimes they point out our need to better communicate the services we provide. In either case, we accept the responsibility to provide access to the biomedical literature needed by our users.
1. This article is based on: Brought to you in part by the Robert B. Greenblatt, M.D. Library, Access, April-June, 2001. It is published with their permission.
Last Updated: July 9, 2008
