---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 00:20:14 +0000 (GMT)
From: bernd-christoph.kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de
Subject: Re: Best Journal Hosting Sites Follow up

Dear list members,

I found the style and content of Ms Belcher's communication quite
disturbing, especially given her function as the manager of a respected
although small academic press. It seems quite presumptous and careless to
offer a summary allegedly representing the opinion of "what librarians had
to say" after waiting just one day to collect opinions, especially in such
complex matter.

I would urge Ms Belcher to approach ALPSP, the Association of Learned and
Professional Society Publishers in this matter to get advice what to
consider when making decisions with respect to journal hosting. (They even
offer their own ALPSP Learned Journals Collection in collaboration with
Swets and Extenza.) I also second Mark Ware's advice to send out an RFP to
all possible journal hosting services and compare what they have to offer.
It's certainly not a bad idea to care for the opinion of the library
community if it comes to ponder several available options, but I would
consider it premature and unwise to rely on some isolated quickly
collected opinions that can deal only with one aspect (the library
perspective, which may be a broad or a rather narrow one), and to boldly
generalize from that. It seems unfair to single out one aggregator as a
"bad boy", when this is certainly not true as many of those problems are
really of a structural nature and plaguing all aggregators and journal
hosting services to various degrees (cf. Swets' recent initiative to
improve the journal supply chain efficiency by implementing standardized
institutional identifiers, or the many useful documents and discussions of
critical issues provided on the ASA (Association of Subscription Agents
and Intermediaries).

One problem is, of course, that journal hosting services ultimately depend
on the publisher's cooperation. From the library's perspective, publishers
often do not care enough for the stability of the services they offer, one
aspect of which is the continued availability of the archive when a
business decision is made to change hosting services. Ms Belchers very own
press seems to give a good (or rather bad) example in this respect: it is
sad if a publisher has to take his journal offline and is not able to
organize a smooth and timely transition from self hosted to external
hosting. Such a behaviour is likely to offend librarians and their clients
on and off campus who expect that subscriptions paid for are available
also online at the work place and do not disappear from one day to the
other (which by the way also seriously affects the visibility of your
authors).

With respect to Ingenta, Belcher's comments seem quite inappropriate and
misplaced in tone. The portrait of Ingenta sketched here strikes me as
little informed and unbalanced, especially as it ignores their track
record of achievements as a journal aggregator. For libraries, in the
early years, it was very important to have an option to get online access
to many journals and get a rather reliable archive also for cancelled
titles, without incurring further platform costs, integration with docdel
services (Uncover) was also important, as was the pioneering of
Catchword's reliable distributed global server network, that was later
integrated into Ingenta's architecture.

During the larger part of my own 10-year experience as electronic resource
librarian at Stuttgart University library I have always respected Ingenta
for its rather quick, helpful and friendly customer service, that owes
much to the very dedicated team they inherited from the former Catchword
when the companies (that had quite different philosophies and
orientations) were merged. Ingenta certainly had their share of criticism
in spring of last year, some of it deserved, although it wasn't their
fault alone. And I can assure you that libraries have problems with agents
activating titles on other aggregator platforms as well. For example, one
recurring problem is that some agencies do not routinely pass on end
customer information to publishers when customers use their consolidation
services for delivery of printed issues. The one reason why perhaps
problems of this kind tend to become more visible with Ingenta is that
IngentaConnect for many of us is the host of choice for a lot of titles
from many publishers that are not covered in the big deals. As Lesley
Crawshaw from UKSG recently wrote on lis-e-journals, this is a highly
complex issue involving many different parties (publishers, agencies,
hosting services or additional aggregators, and libraries) all of whom
share some responsibility when things go wrong. But at least Ingenta has
paid attention to their customers and advice given on and off list (it is
helpful that they do follow the lists, are always cooperative and respond
openly to all issues raised) and implemented important changes in their
policies that already proved effective (cf. Amel Abourachid's letter to
this list). Ingenta has also learned that lean management is not a good
idea when it comes to customer service and reenforced their staff
considerably. They also have recognized (cf. their Ingenta Connect
Collections program) that libraries want more flexibility and tailoring to
their specific collection profiles, at affordable consortial prices, and
are no longer interested to get stuck in the big publisher deals. It is
exactly this kind of flexibility that is important for the survival of
libraries and the smaller academic publishers in hard economic times.
Ingenta also partnered early with Google to full-text index aggregated
content, raising its visibility of publisher's content dramatically. So,
suggestions of a possible demise of this aggregator are greatly
exaggerated...

Other aggregators though offer similar services, and diversity and
competition is desirable and healthy. In librarian's view, it is best if
publishers offer their content via different aggregators. For example,
Project Muse Titles of Duke UP are available also on HighWire and MIT
Press titles are available also on IngentaConnect, and those services can
also be accomodated by most vendor gateways (like EBSCO's and Swets').
Project Muse would indeed seem a natural home for your journal, given its
focus and spectrum of titles. JSTOR is an additional option to make
available your older backfile content to a wide range of libraries,
provided that you are interested in digital preservation of your content
and JSTOR is interested to add your journal. Their license is
nonexclusive, the moving wall policy is designed "to avoid jeopardizing
publishers' subscriptions and revenue opportunities from current and
recent material, while also enabling libraries and researchers to rely on
JSTOR as a trusted archive, providing both preservation and access for
journals after a reasonable period of time."

You should also allow libraries to archive via LOCKSS. I would also
strongly suggest that you establish a copyright policy that allows
self-archiving by authors, cf.
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#publishers-do and consider to
make at least older content available open access (as is current practice
of many journals hosted by HighWire, but also possible to arrange with
other hosting services).

Finally: why not (re)convert your journal to Open Access, following the
example of two other UCLA journals (the "Heritage Language Journal" and
"Interactions"), and let the California Digital Library's eScholarship do
the hosting? (Provided that UCLA finds other ways to support the journal,
which may not be trivial as I recognize...). Then you might even do
without paying any commercial aggregators ...

Best regards,
Bernd-Christoph Kaemper
Electronic Resources Coordinator,
Stuttgart University Library

P.S.: Very thorough reviews on aggregator services from the librarian's
perspective may be found in the Charleston Advisor,
http://www.charlestonco.com, e.g. they covered Project Muse,
ingenta/catchword, JSTOR, HighWire Press, as well as a lot of informative
editorials and columns that cover a lot of issues of interest to
information professionals.