Over the last two years, I have detected an interesting trend amonst publishers,

both commercial and learned society. Faced with slowly declining sales of

printed volumes,  and confronted with a great deal of pressure from the likes

of people like me to  "go electronic", many if not most have responded

with e-versions of journals, books, reviews etc.  There have been some

famous print "casualties" as a result; take Encyclopaedia Britannica,

wich  I think may no longer offer a print version, or closer to chemistry,

the now defunct Beilstein  printed volume series.

Some of the e-only volumes have emerged on CD-ROM, others

are offered only via the Web.  The  e-version has pros and cons

of course.  On the con side can be counted the observation that

to the end user, it is rarely cheaper than the print version, and sometimes

is much more expensive, or can only be obtained if  a still existing

print version is ordered as well. Another con is that the e-version

might only be  "leased" for eg a period of 1 year, whereas of course

a print version would be owned for ever. Even an apparently

permanently owned CD ROM may well have to be "refreshed"

every 5-15 years to take advantage of new technologies,

a cost that the end user will have to bear. Finally on

the cons,  I note that its the user who has the burden of printing

if they do wish a printed copy, and who has to pay e.g. any telecoms

costs etc. 

On the pro side is the ability to search quickly and easily, often (but not always) with

much greater sophistication than one could with the printed index,

and the ability to follow links and themes across articles, and indeed

into the wider Internet.  There is the prospect of using  e-journals and books

for so-called "resource discovery" and information mining (a prospect

which however needs a much better implementation of meta-data or a

resource description framework; http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax/ 

by the majority of publishers)   The prospect

of even richer "mining", via eg full chemical substructure searching

and chemical resource description frameworks, lies in the future.

Balancing the  "just-in-time" publishers approach to providing

e-journals  is an apparent lobby group acting on behalf of authors, and their copyrights

(http://www.alcs.co.uk/DECLARATION.html ), and of course the interests of

the "Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society". Can we assume authors will

continue signing over copyright to publishers?

Perhaps we also need a "Readers' Licensing Society" to look after

the interests of the people who, directly or indirectly, will ultimately have to

bear the costs of this paradigm shift in publishing?  I wonder if the vast majority

of readers are fully aware of what is in store for them, perhaps in the very near

future, and whether they are aware of the decisions being made on their

behalf by publishers on the one hand, and librarians on the other.

Dr Henry Rzepa,  Dept. Chemistry,  Imperial College,  LONDON SW7 2AY;
mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel  (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804.
URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/