I must refer Paul Gherman's well-meaning response to the exchange with Andrew Odlyzko that has just appeared in this Forum, concerning the realistic way to estimate untrammeled click-access to the entire relevant full-text corpus for all researchers. -- S. H.
----------------- Original message (ID=21658C65) (66 lines) ------------------- List-Post: [email protected] List-Post: [email protected] Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 16:32:01 -0600 From: "Paul M. Gherman" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Survey: How many refereed journals can your library NOT afford? To: September 1998 American Scientist Forum <[email protected]> Steven, Although no faculty member as "easy" access to every article in their field, some of today's libraries come very close to providing just that. Vanderbilt subscribes to a significant number of article databases like Science Direct and ProQuest that provide hundreds of thousands of articles. If these services do not have the necessary article, we then go to the document delivery services like UnCover. And if UnCover does not have it, we turn to interlibrary loan. Most libraries are finding that the use of ILL is growing at double digit levels and has been for a decade. So yes, we do not subscribe to everything, but for some of our faculty, almost everything is attainable one way or another. Publishers are moving away from individual subscriptions, and are offering access to article databases instead because they recognize and libraries recognize that we do not necessarily subscribe to just the journals our faculty want. We were part of U of Michigan's PEAK experiment, and we found that our faculty used just as many articles from the Elsevier journals we did not subscribe to as the ones we did subscribe to when they were given access to everything. So Science Direct made sense. (This behavior supports your argument too.) I understand you interest in finding out the data, but I do not think it is easily gathered. ARL has a great deal of data that may be of help to you however. Paul M. Gherman University Librarian 611B General Library 419 21st Avenue South Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37240 Office: (615) 322-7120 Fax: (615) 343-8279 [email protected]
