Library Economic Metrics: Examples of the Comparison of Electronic and Print Journal Collections and Collection Services

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Designing the Future of Electronic Journals With Lessons Learned From the Past: Economic and Use Patterns of Scientific Journals

Studies of thousands of both university and non-university scientists demonstrate the importance of scholarly journals to their work. Amount of reading has remained high and scientists who read more, are more successful. Readings have shifted from personal subscriptions to more readings from library provided journals. Personal subscriptions have gone down from 5.8 subscriptions per scientist in 1977 to about 2.9 subscriptions. The drop is due to the rising prices of subscriptions, prices that have increased beyond inflation rates. Processing costs decrease some with electronic journals, but the high fixed costs associated with creating scholarly journals are the same for print or for electronic. The costs associated with some value added features of electronic journals are high

An Evidence-based Assessment of the Author Pays Model

Much discussion of author payments as a means to Open Access lacks consideration of evidence on their potential impact on the scholarly journal system. Our recent work perhaps sheds new light on both favourable and unfavourable aspects of this option. We emphasize the diversity of communication communities among authors, and between the authors and the extensive non-author reading community. We also take a broad system perspective, given that the author payment model will potentially impact not only authors but also, for example, R&D funders, university and other organization staff and library budgets, publishers, and readers. This raises several issues. Who should fund author payment? Can subscription and author payment models co-exist? How should new author payment journals be financed

Engineers and Scholarly Journals: Reading Patterns in the Electronic Era

Scholarly journals are an important source of trusted information, although the engineering professional reads fewer journal articles on average than do members of the scientific and engineering academic communities. Studies have shown that engineers spend a smaller proportion of work time reading from scholarly journals and that they read fewer articles than scientists and physicians. Nonetheless journals are useful and valuable to engineers, who also read many types of information resources, including standards, technical reports, books, and articles

A Central American Success Story: Innovation in International Distance Education

Based on actual workshop experiences, faculty at the Honduran Zamorano University in Central America created an effective, size-neutral, world-class distance education (e-learning) program for serving learners throughout Latin America through online and distance learning technology. The program is known as PAC @ D (Programa de Aprendizaje Continuo a Distancia or Life Long Learning Program at a Distance). It is administered by Zamorano’s global center for distance learning. The establishment of PAC @ D in 2010 was preceded by workshop efforts begun in 2004 by the authors. The workshop efforts focused on bridging the cultural uniqueness of educational programs in Latin America and the United States. The goal was to assist local faculty and staff at Zamorano University to build their own digital platform effectively and extend academic and outreach programs through that digital platform. The use of online and distance learning technologies can help extend intellectual capital beyond the limits of the physical campus in fulfilling the teaching, outreach/extension, and, to a limited extent, research missions. However, as we shall see in this professional paper, distance learning is more than turning on the technology with a click and a keystroke. At Zamorano, the development of PAC @ D required many hours of a full range of pedagogical and technological training, spread over 18 months. This professional development paper provides the rationale for PAC @ D, outlines its development, and provides suggestions for enhancing the educational experiences of distance learners