Concurrent Sessions

1. La Jolla Confidential: The Inside "Dope" on BioOne

Marilu Goodyear, Vice Chancellor for Information Services, University of Kansas, and
Adrian W. Alexander, Executive Director, Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium.

The University of Kansas and the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium have entered into a partnership with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), Allen Press, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). This partnership will create a database, to be known as BioOne, of full-text electronic journals published by several AIBS member societies. The venture provides the first opportunity for most of these societies to produce their journals digitally. BioOne will offer integrated access to scholarly information in whole organism biology, ecology, and environmental sciences. It also provides a unique opportunity for libraries to collaborate with the private, for-profit sector and professional societies in the creation of a full-text electronic product. This session will describe the genesis and development of the partnership and outline the roles of each of the partners. The presenters will also discuss the development of a financial plan and licensing agreements, which will meet the needs of both the library community and the scholarly societies.

2. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Key Issues for Serialists

Trisha L. Davis, Head, Serials and Electronic Resources Department, The Ohio State University Libraries.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is an extremely complex piece of legislation that makes major changes to U.S. Copyright Law, specifically in the digital networked environment. Many legal and practical issues are addressed in this legislation that have an enormous impact on the library community. This session will outline the key issues for libraries and alert serialists to the issues that directly or indirectly affect their work. Whether we are concerned with access, delivery, preservation, or archiving, the DMCA affects what we do on a daily basis. In the near future, as the law is being applied and tested in court, libraries must actively identify its impact on their mission and goals, and work to assure proper protection under the law.

3. Globalization, Consolidation and the Growth of the Giants: Scholarly Communication, the Individual and the Internet

John Cox, Principal, John Cox Associates.

The creation of publishing conglomerates and the emergence of purchasing consortia are changing the economic model of scholarly publishing and the process of individual collection management. This talk will cover the likely impact of the giants on the serials community in the next decade: alliances between publishers and other information providers, the continuing importance of quality control and peer review, and the needs of authors and readers. Some informed speculation will challenge the complacency and conservatism of many in the serials community.

4. SPARC: Setting Sail into the Seas of Competition

Julia Blixrud, Assistant Director, Public Programs, SPARC.

The new ship SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) was formally launched in 1998 as a response to the realization within the research library community that the lack of competition in the marketplace for scientific journals could eventually translate into the collapse of scientific communications. To facilitate competition, SPARC nurtures the creation of high-quality, low-priced, peer-reviewed STM publications, and works to reduce the risk to its publisher-partners of entering markets in which prices are highest and competition is needed most. The SPARC crew of libraries and partners is helping ships of scholars and societies navigate through the uncharted waters of electronic scholarly publishing. This session will describe the SPARC ship and the course it is taking for those who might want to sail along.

5. Changing Patterns of E-Journal Use at OhioLINK

Tom Sanville, Executive Director, OhioLINK.

Use of electronic journals through the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center strongly indicates that patrons are using electronic journals at greater rates than print journals were ever used. This new usage pattern suggests that our collection development approaches need to evolve as well in order to ensure that we are able to expand journal access within our economic realities. This session will address e-journal use patterns and collection development.

6. An Upward Spiral: Publisher Mergers and Journal Pricing

Mark J. McCabe, Assistant Professor of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology.

While employed in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, Mark McCabe began an assessment of the impact of the merger of two academic publishers on the pricing of their academic journals. Taking into account the library's unique role in providing information and the library's purchasing behavior, i.e., title selection is based on price and expected usage, McCabe developed a portfolio theory for academic journal markets. In this session, Mark McCabe will talk about his journals portfolio theory and the ability to predict the effect of publisher mergers on journal prices. In addition, he will discuss his ongoing research that examines the impact of the entry of new journals into the market on the prices and sales of existing journals, and the behavioral differences between profit and non-profit companies.

7. Speaking a Serials Cataloging Tongue: Lingua Franca for the Web?

Debora Seys, Information Consultant, Hewlett Packard Labs Research Library

Serials have always presented interesting bibliographic problems to solve. These include such issues as granularity, variability, evolution, and relationship -- the same questions that content managers face when working with information in a web environment. This session will compare the highly evolved world of serials cataloging to the emerging methods of metadata and markup, exposing universal definitions and translating them in a way that will prove useful as we enter the world of intelligent documents and publishing on the web.

8. A Tale of Two Archive Projects: The Open Archives Project and PubMed Central

The Open Archives Initiative: Interoperable, Interdisciplinary Author Self-Archiving Comes of Age

Rick Luce, Research Library Director/Library Without Walls Project Leader, Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library.

The Open Archives initiative was organized to create a forum to solve interoperability issues between author self-archiving solutions, as a way to promote their global acceptance. The first and most important such archive is Los Alamos National Laboratory's Physics Preprint Archive. Created by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, the archive now houses over 120,000 papers, mirrored worldwide in fifteen countries, with over 80,000 users daily. Other disciplines and institutions have begun to create public research archives along similar lines. What is needed now are conventions that ensure these archives work together so that any paper in any of these archives can be found from anyone's desktop worldwide, as if it were all in one virtual public library. This session will provide a status report on the Open Archives initiative, highlight the minimal technical requirements adopted, and discuss issues related to the development and implementation of a distributed interoperable repository.

PubMed Central: A Barrier-Free Repository for the Life Sciences

Liz Pope, Staff Scientist, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Many STM publishers are moving from publishing print journals to producing information resources on the Internet. In the Spring of 1999, the need for fast and efficient dissemination of research information led Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of the National Institutes of Health, and several colleagues to establish PubMed Central, a web-based repository at NIH, which provides barrier-free access to primary research reports in the life sciences. Based on its natural integration with the existing PubMed retrieval system, PubMed Central serves as a host for scientific publishers, professional societies, and other groups to archive, organize, and distribute at no cost peer-reviewed reports from journals, as well as reports that have been screened but not formally peer-reviewed. This session will provide a status report on the PubMed Central project and discuss issues related to the development and implementation of the repository.