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

Electronic Journals: How User Behavior is Changing

From 1977 through 2001 the authors have conducted a series of studies that examine reading and publishing habits of scientists in both university and non-university settings (including private companies and national laboratories). For the last decade the studies have measured the influence of ejournals on scholarly reading and publishing behaviours. These studies demonstrate that scientists continue to read widely from scholarly journals primarily for research and current awareness. Reading of scholarly articles has increased to approximately 120-13 articles per person per year, with engineers reading fewer journal articles on the average and medical faculty reading more. A growing amount of these readings come from eprints and other separate copies. A greater percentage of readings are now of new articles and readings from electronic journals are more likely to be of current articles. Approximately half to all of scientists in a discipline now use electronic journals at least part of the time, with considerable variations among disciplines. On the average, nearly one-third of journal articles read now come from electronic journals or digital databases. Evidence suggests that scientists are reading from a broader range of journals than in the past, influenced by timely electronic publishing and by growth in bibliographic searching and interpersonal communication as means of identifying and locating evident that the value scientists place on the information found in scholarly journal articles, whether electronic or print, remains high