Monday, January 21, 2002

Elsevier Offers Electronic-Only Option for Journal Subscriptions By SCOTT CARLSON Elsevier Science announced Friday that it would begin offering electronic-only subscriptions for its ScienceDirect package, a collection of more than 1,200 journals. Institutions previously had to subscribe to paper editions of the journals to get access to their electronic versions. ScienceDirect's new subscription option, dubbed E-Choice, will also extend to 175 journals that are part of the Academic Press collection, once owned by the publishing company Harcourt General and distributed on that company's IDEAL database. Elsevier Science's parent corporation, Reed Elsevier, bought Harcourt last summer and has since begun merging the databases. By May, all of the Academic Press journals will be part of the ScienceDirect package. Chrysanne Lowe, vice president for account development at Elsevier Science, said the new subscription option might let libraries save money. She declined to specify the savings but said that a library could pay a base amount for an electronic subscription, then 25 percent of the paper-subscription price for paper copies. A library also would benefit from signing a single license for both ScienceDirect and Academic Press titles, Ms. Lowe said. "One platform is a lot simpler than two, and they have to train for only one platform. And the licensing process can be cumbersome, and this is one less license that they need to negotiate." However, to combine the two databases on one platform, existing customers of either database will have to sign new licensing agreements that encompass the additional Academic Press titles, she added. Library officials responded to news of the mergers and subscriptions with cautious approval. Carla J. Stoffle, dean of libraries at the University of Arizona, said she wondered what sort of archiving structures would be available and whether libraries would continue to get access to older journals they had paid for at the time of publication if they subsequently dropped the service or if Elsevier later dropped the journal. Ms. Stoffle said her library saved some money now through discounts and tracking services offered by subscription agents, through which it buys journals, and wondered if those services would be offered through ScienceDirect. "The devil's in the details," she said. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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