Individual Article:
The transition to online journal subscriptions benefits both libraries and users
The journal as we know it originated in 17th-century England, when letters written by scholars, often reporting on conversations with distant colleagues, were printed on broadsides and distributed by couriers to known addresses. With the foundation of scientific societies after 1660, the journal became an established fixture of exchange between colleagues near and far. Many of these journals retained the newspaper format and were published and distributed fresh monthly, weekly, some even daily. Many savants resided the entire day in coffee houses, waiting for the delivery of the day's journals and intelligencers. That seems to us today, in a world of blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, to be a very long time ago. But timeliness of production and targeted delivery remain the priorities of journal publication.
Today, scholarly communication, particularly in the form of journal articles, is in the midst of dramatic change. Many recent journals have been launched as online-only projects, and other journals are adding data tables, multimedia, and other content to their online versions that is not part of the print. Publishers are moving towards journals that are online-only, and many are encouraging the conversion of print or print+online subscriptions to online-only. For example, the American Physical Society has declared that online versions of its journals are now the "version of record," and in the event of any discrepancy between the print and online, the online version will be considered official.
There are many potential advantages for libraries in conversion to online-only subscriptions. In most cases, subscriptions to journals in online-only format involve significant cost savings over online+print, and of course libraries also save costs associated with checking in print issues, binding, and storing them. Online versions are also far more convenient for users, who can access them from anywhere at any time, whether the Library is open or not. In addition, increasingly the earlier volumes of journals are being digitized so that entire runs (in some cases going back to the 17th century) are available online and fully searchable. The Northwestern University Library Committee has passed a resolution that the Library should, whenever possible, convert its serials subscriptions to online-only, in order to fully take advantage of these benefits.
We have already taken significant steps in this conversion to digital formats. Northwestern's subscriptions with many large commercial publishers have been converted to an online basis, where the primary subscriptions are online and print content, if needed, is only at additional expense. Almost all of our subscriptions from Elsevier, Wiley, Kluwer, Springer, and Blackwell are now or soon will be received in online format only. In addition, many of our subscriptions to the journals of scholarly societies, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, American Physical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, Optical Society of America, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and others, are now being received in online format only. We anticipate that virtually all of Northwestern's subscriptions will be converted to online format by 2010 -- the sole exceptions being journals published outside the commercial mainstream, and from a number of world regions outside Western Europe, North America, and Japan.
Robert Michaelson and Jeffrey Garrett