Although the Internet has long been a medium for experimental electronic serials, mainstream publishers (and partner organizations) are now beginning to embrace the Internet, particularly WWW technology, as a ubiquitous way to offer their publications to the international community. Although there appears to be widespread use of standard web technology to offer electronic serial publications, there are many areas still in their infancy including clear and understandable pricing algorithms, electronic page layout, copyright issues, backfile availability, guaranteed accessibility, mirroring of data, and other issues.
Some publishers are developing their own servers for offering access to their electronic journals and magazines. Others are working in partnerships with libraries, academic institutions, nonprofit organizations and other commercial sector companies to offer their journals on the network. In some cases smaller publishers and professional societies are working with organizations such as OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) to act as the electronic distributor of the electronic journals.
Listed below are some of the major efforts by publishers and their partners. For more generic directories of electronic journals see the Other directories of electronic journals.
In March 1997, the Alliance also has produced a report entitled Electronic Journal Market Overview - 1997 which provides an overview of general issues surrounding electronic journals, a review of publisher activities and an overview of aggregators of electronic journals.
Academic Press IDEAL is a 3-year developmental project of Academic Press, to offer its entire body of 176 journals on the Internet using web technology. Starting with 1996 issues, Academic Press will add over 2,000 articles per month for its entire body of journals. To create the ideal project a partnership has been created between Academic Press, Fujitsu (and its affiliates), Bath University (U.K.) and several other publishers (including the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry). Anyone can search the IDEAL database of journal tables of contents with any standard web browser and the searching of abstracts is also free. Subscribers can view the full articles using with a standard browser with an Adobe Acrobat PDF viewer. At the present, Academic Press has sold its entire subscription base to a British consortium of all higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. AP is actively marketing with major library consortia in the United States having recently sold to such groups as OhioLink and VIVA (Virginia). The pricing and contract restrictions offered by AP are still evolving and somewhat complicated. Academic Press has a server in Bath, England and a mirror site in California to split traffic on this data intensive web site.
Blackwell Science is a leading publisher of books and journals in the science/technology/medicine (STM) areas. They currently publish around 225 journals mostly from scholarly societies, and as so, are the largest publisher of society journals in the world. Synergy is the online journal service from Blackwell Science and Munksgaard. Synergy was launched in January 1999 and will encompass over 200 journals by 2000. The majority of the journals available through Synergy are published on behalf of Learned Societies and Associations and include some of the leading titles in Science Technology and Medicine. Some of the special features of the Synergy service includes personal homepages for all registered users, offers free access to abstracts and tables of contents, and contains full text HTML in addition to PDFs.
CRC Press is in the process of putting its journal collection on the world wide web by scanning printed issues and using the PDF format from Adobe Acrobat. During the "beta" test of this experimental project several of their titles are available free of charge. Once the titles go into regular production on the web there will be a cost for access. CRC Press primarily publishes journals in the science and technology areas such as "Critical Reviews in Analytical Chemistry," "Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications," and "Journal of Soil Contamination."
Elsevier Press is taking a two pronged approach to offering its huge inventory of over 1,200 titles in electronic format. At the present these journals are available in a TIFF image format with header information (i.e. abstract and citation) available in SGML. Elsevier has plans to migrate their titles to a combination of Adobe PDF and/or HTML in the near future. The EES (Elsevier Electronic Service) will allow an organization to license and locally load all or some of the Elsevier titles on a local server with that site being responsible for the hardware, software and archiving function. Sites may pick their own solutions although EES is known to work well with the OCLC SiteSearch package, Orion Scientific's Science Server and several others. However, because Elsevier will be changing from TIFF to PDF/HTML any solution which is chosen or designed must be able to handle files in different formats (Elsevier does not have plans at this time to upgrade the older TIFF files). Elsevier has also announced their ScienceDirect (SD) in which Elsevier will put all of its own journals online via the web and users may pay for access to the electronic project using Orion Scientific's Science Server software. Elsevier says that it will also host electronic journals from other publishers if they would like to participate. In addition, to subscription-based access the SD server will also offer articles for sale on an individual basis. SD will be in beta testing from March-June 1997 with full public release of the first 300 biomedical titles by July 1997. Elsevier is targeting to have all of its 1,200 titles online by the end of 1997 or early 1998. Some of the special features available in SD will be full-text searching as well as searching of headers, linking from citation databases to the full text, document delivery for individual articles, and the eventual inclusion auxiliary data sets, multimedia and discussion groups. Pricing for the EES service will be the print cost plus 6.5% for a three year contract or print plus 15% for a one year contract. The SD will have the same surcharges as EES but an additional access fee for using the SD server (this has not been announced at this time). At this time, Elsevier has refused to offer any of its full-text electronic journal titles to any other aggregator (e.g. OCLC, EBSCO) so that one must either go to their ScienceDirect site or locally load Elsevier titles under their EES licensing program. The one major exception to this will be Lexis/Nexis since it is also a subsidiary Reed Elsevier and will begin carrying the Elsevier electronic journals at some undetermined point in the future.
HighWire Press is a collaborative project between Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SUL/AIR). The project is unique in that it is a partnership in the scholarly community bringing together faculty scientists, librarians, technology experts and students. Some of the unique features of their titles include the fact that they are full-text searchable on the web, they offer links footnotes to other databases and relevant information the web, links within an article to citations in other databases are sometimes provided (e.g. Medline), email links to authors are offered so readers can send email directly to the authors. Their goal is: to: "Partner with scholarly societies and university presses, partner with other universities and publishers to do 'whole job, partner with technology and publishing industry to leverage tools, techniques and provide a testbed for longer term efforts to build upon and experiment with." As of early 1997, HighWire offers such prestigious titles as: Journal of Experimental Medicine, Science Magazine, Pediatrics, Journal Watch, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Neuroscience and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Forthcoming titles include: American Journal of Physiology, Drug Metabolism and Disposition, Genes & Development, Genome Research, Journal of Cell Biology, Journal of General Physiology, Journal of Neurophysiology, Journal of Nutrition, Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Molecular Pharmacology and Physiological Reviews.
JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization created by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to allow the scholarly community to take advantage of information technology. In its original conception, JSTOR was conceived of as an electronic database of pre-1990 issues of ten core scholarly journals in the fields of economics and history all the way back to their beginnings. The idea was for the JSTOR project to become economically self-sustaining after the original support from the foundation. The possibility of linking electronic versions of current journals to electronic versions of a full set of archives is of great interest to researchers. JSTOR is unique in that it is imaging huge backfiles of ten core journals, with publisher approval, with the hopes of adding additional titles as a success is achieved. The JSTOR database consists of bitmapped images (600 dpi) which will allow a person to view the page exactly as it appears in the original printed copy. In addition, a parallel full-text database of ASCII text created by using OCR (optical character recognition) allows for full-text searching using a search engine developed at the University of Michigan (called FTL). Both browsing and searching of the ASCII text is possible with the user then able to retrieve a full bitmapped image over the web. The journals are being scanned in full including articles, book reviews and even advertisements. Printer applications for Macintosh, Windows and Unix machines have been developed which permit authorized users to print full 600 dpi images to any Postscript Level II printer.
Pathway Services is a suite of tools being developed by the U.S. Federal Depository Library Program to direct librarians and the public to Federal government information on the Internet. This web site contains links to many of the Federal electronic journal and serial titles in addition to other governmental information and publications.
OCLC Electronic Collections Online is a web-based electronic journals service for libraries which offers integrated access to a large collection of electronic journals from a variety of academic, professional and scholarly publishers. In the OCLC ECO program, libraries must still license electronic journals either from the publisher or subscription agent and then pay OCLC an additional access fee for access.
Choose now from more than 2,200 journals
from 50 publishers. Journal titles span a
number of academic disciplines, with service growth aimed at providing breadth and depth
of coverage in numerous topic areas. Journals are presented in their entirety, and most
new issues will be added to the service on or before their print publication dates.
Publishers participating in Electronic Collections Online have agreed to an archive stored at OCLC, enabling you to reallocate the
money you would have otherwise spent to maintain paper archives of your journal
collections. As a subscriber, your library is entitled to ongoing access to all of the
journals it has subscribed to through Electronic Collections Online. In addition, OCLC
maintains an off-site archive of all journal content available through the service.
Project Muse is a collaborative project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, to offer worldwide electronic access to the full text of over 40 journals published by the Press. As of early 1997 they have all 40 of their titles online. Johns Hopkins is using the "domain access" subscription model whereby users of an entire institution can access their electronic journals as long as they are coming from an approved Internet domain. All articles are either in HTML or in Adobe PDF format (for scientific or mathematical titles) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are being added to each article to improve article level retrievability. Johns Hopkins is also allowing local institutions who are subscribers to download and archive their publications if they desire since libraries perform this archival function with the print, so let them do it electronically if they are interested. Pricing for their electronic titles is scaled in terms of a single academic campus, for special libraries, for consortia, for small groups of IPs (<25) and for individuals. As an example, a single academic campus can gain electronic access for all 40 titles for around $2,500 with substantial discounts then being available for print (60% discount) if desired. Scaled pricing models makes their titles very attractive.
Springer-Verlag publishes over 400 STM journals and is developing its own LINK electronic service in which subscribers to any of these titles will go to a Springer controlled web site where access is offered. Springer-Verlag is developing its online service in cooperation with IBM (who will be supplying the server RISC 6000 hardware) and OpenText (who will be supplying the search engine). Springer has decided not to offer its titles for loading on other systems because they are interested in offering a suite of value-added features beyond just the imaging of the print equivalents. Some of the features will be adding include: the addition of multimedia to articles when appropriate, the addition of data sets or other database information to augment the printed articles, the ability for users to work interactively with formula and equations while within the web site so that users can apply their own values or chart data, the addition of other illustrations and graphs, and the creation of online forums so that scholars in specialized fields may communicate.
Wiley InterScience offers online editions of more than 400 scientific, technical, medical, and professional journals. Each journal features tables of contents, article abstracts, full-text articles, and links to important resources such as sources of funding.
Ziff Davis is one of the leading publishers of magazines on computers and the Internet. Their web site offers online versions of their printed counterparts. Selected articles are reprinted from each title from such popular magazines as PCWeek, PC Magazine, MacWEEK, Computer Shopper, PCComputing, Interactive Week, Nuke InterNETWORK, MacUser, Computer Gaming, ComputerLife, FamilyPC, Yahoo! Internet Life and Yahoo! Computing.