[236] in Information Retrieval
Forwarded Message ["John A. Cook": A recent speech by Sue Lewis!!]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeff Solof)
Tue Jun 14 09:26:49 1994
To: elibdev@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 94 09:25:49 EDT
From: Jeff Solof <jsolof@MIT.EDU>
fyi...
------- Forwarded Message
Date: 14 Jun 94 01:22:57 -0400
From: "John A. Cook" <73324.1105@CompuServe.COM>
To: Jeff Solof <jsolof@MIT.EDU>
Subject: A recent speech by Sue Lewis!!
Jeff,
Thought you might be more than a little interested in the following
speech that was delivered by Sue Lewis recently!! Enjoy!!
John.
- --------------- Forwarded Message ---------------
From: Susan Lewis, INTERNET:SUELEWIS@JHUVM.HCF.JHU.EDU
To: John A. Cook, 73324,1105
Date: Wed, Jun 1, 1994, 3:27 PM
Subject: FINAL COPY
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Date: Wed, 01 Jun 94 15:30:16 EDT
From: Susan Lewis <SUELEWIS@JHUVM.HCF.JHU.EDU>
Subject: FINAL COPY
To: "John A. Cook" <73324.1105@COMPUSERVE.COM>
"From Earth to Ether: One Publisher's
Reincarnation"
Susan Lewis, Online Projects Manager, Johns
Hopkins University Press
North American Serials Interest Group
Ninth Annual Conference
June 2-5, 1994
When Alex Bloss called last January and asked me
to speak at this conference about how my job had
changed due to the impact of electronic publishing,
I was in the midst of working with a computer
programmer to develop "perl scripts" that would
automatically convert PostScript files to Internet-
deliverable files. This particular process was crucial
to developing a prototype for delivering Johns
Hopkins journals in electronic form, and while the
results enabled us to prepare 47 articles for
electronic publication with a minimum of labor, it
differed significantly from the traditional text-
preparation procedure normally used by scholarly
publishers.
The collaborative aspect of our online journals
project didn't resemble traditional publishing,
either. This collaboration involves the press, the
library, and the computing center at the Johns
Hopkins University in a large-scale effort that will
eventually lead to the online publication of over
forty of the Press's journals in the humanities and
social sciences.
One result of this alliance is a robust prototype
consisting of four journal issues, a sophisticated
search engine, full-screen illustrations, text and
voice annotations, and many additional features.
Another is our conviction that electronic journals
can not only enhance research and education but be
economically priced if certain criteria are met.
The most important result of the JHU experience,
however, is the emergence of a new way of doing
business for the university press and its library
subscribers. This involves engaging libraries in a
"partnership of interest" with the press that will
enable us to deliver scholarly publications in a way
that integrates library involvement and feedback so
we can tailor the form of these publications to serve
the actual needs of scholars and readers.
The Project Muse prototype, as well as the trial
partnership with the Milton S. Eisenhower Library,
have enabled us to identify four areas that are key to
the success of this larger process. These include
marketing, rights and permissions, true costs, and
product pricing. The effect of our approach to these
issues will also affect staffing and the traditional
production process.
Market Readiness and Marketing
In the context of a partnership, rather than a
relationship as suppliers and customers, marketing
becomes education. This is a very different
approach, designed to inform and gather feedback,
rather than simply announce and persuade, as is
done in traditional sales and advertising campaigns.
By making education and technical assistance the
focus of our marketing efforts, we can actually create
a product and a market based on input from those
who will use it. This approach is not just mutually
beneficial to the partners -- it is absolutely essential
since libraries must create or have in place an
electronic environment that benefits their readers
before they can take full advantage of electronically
delivered journals.
To facilitate the creation of this environment, our
intitiative will involve assessing library needs so we
can provide the consultation and information most
relevant to these needs. In other words, educating
libraries about the advantages of our approach for
their readers will involve working directly with
libraries and "focus groups" of users to determine:
- -- library readiness and experience with full-text
databases
- -- library hardware and network infrastructure,
including "front end" software
- -- reader sophistication and usage patterns
- -- online access to reader training materials
Reader involvement is an important part of the
educational process, and the end users of our
electronic journals will be encouraged to respond via
electronic forms and questionnaires, as they have in
the simplified but very useful form developed for
the prototype. One scenario might be where
comments about the the local electronic
environment are forwarded to the contact person at
the local site; comments about the journal content
are forwarded to the appropriate editor; and
comments about the quality of the electronic
product are used by the publisher to improve the
product.
Rights and Permissions
In the course of conversations between the press
and library at Johns Hopkins, we identified two
possible disadvantages of electronic journals from
the library's point of view. These are first, if the
library stops subscribing, it is left with no holdings,
and second, if the publisher goes out of business, the
digitized materials could be lost forever.
Because of these concerns, the Press will grant
libraries unlimited print copying privileges for their
patrons' personal use but not for course packs or
interlibrary loan. As permitted by fair use and other
provisions of the 1976 copyright law, university
libraries may provide paper articles for interlibrary
loan. They may also send articles electronically for
downloading and printing by another library on ILL
but not for electronic storage at the borrowing
library.
Full subscribers to the Press's electronic journals, in
other words, will be able to make unlimited copies
for internal use and up to six copies for interlibrary
loan. For digitized text, we believe that conversion to
media such as film or CD-ROM is entirely
appropriate for the purpose of preservation -- but
not selling print copies or sending electronic copies
to file servers located at other universities or other
electronic networks, listservs, bulletin boards, etc.
Interestingly, networked document delivery from
our database will very probably turn out to be more
economical than interlibrary loan, and may be a
profitable way to replace ILL to the mutual benefit
of the Press and subscribing libraries. This is one
area we are examining closely, too.
Determining True Costs
Our goal is not simply to offer electronic journals,
but to price them in a way that is cost-effective for
libraries, i.e., at lower rates than their paper
counterparts. But cost-effective pricing is not
possible unless electronic publishing is cost-
effective as well.
To set pricing effectively, we have had to ascertain
the economics of electronic publishing, including
differences in first-copy and additional copy costs
for paper and electronic formats. First-copy costs
are those incurred to produce a single copy of the
journal, including vetting, editing, and marketing.
These costs are constant no matter what format is
used. Additional copy costs include manufacturing
additional copies, distribution, and storage. These
costs are affected by the final form of the journal.
Through data gathered from the Project Muse
prototype, as well as our paper-based operation, we
have ascertained that additional copy costs are
lower for electronic journals than they are for paper
journals. Excluding start-up costs for equipment
and labor, we therefore believe we can sell electronic
journals for less than paper journals. This projection
is based on labor and cost estimates extrapolated
from a small prototype and applied to a forty-journal
program, and it assumes only a modest number of
library subscribers in the first three years. As more
subscribers come on board -- and as we get better
and more efficient in the electronic medium -- we
expect that greater cost reductions may be possible.
Pricing Strategy
Our experience with the prototype revealed that the
ongoing tasks and equipment necessary for
electronic publishing were less expensive than the
manufacturing costs for paper journals. The hitch,
however, involves start-up costs and ongoing costs
for the first few years. Unless these are covered by
grants or special university funding, it is unlikely that
in the first three years a paper-based publisher of
humanities and social-science journals -- even a
press with as large a program as the Johns Hopkins
University Press -- can move to electronic publishing
in a way that results in lower prices for libraries.
This leads to a second concern. Exactly how can a
publisher ascertain a means of licensing, set
appropriate fees, and collect payments for the use of
electronic materials that is practical? Expanding the
Project Muse prototype so it includes all 40 of the
Press's journals has required a long, hard look at
paper pricing and distribution procedures and then
comparing them with pricing and distribution for
electronic media.
Of the two models we considered, site licensing and
subscription, we decided on the second. The first,
site licensing, involves pricing according to each
university's Full-Time Enrollment (FTE) and is
commonly used by software publishers to distribute
a variety of packages on campus. Both librarians
and computing-center professionals, however,
report that while these arrangements seem very
comprehensive in the beginning, they often end up
escalating to an astronomical yearly fee designed to
cover possible losses from unlimited access by the
university community.
The second model, subscription, involves charging a
flat rate for an electronic publication -- regardless of
a university's size -- and works the same way paper
subscriptions do. For publishers and libraries alike,
this model is more convenient because it doesn't
require a detailed contractual agreement, offers
renewals on an annual rather than a multi-year
basis, and is not based on the university's FTE, as
site licensing is. The disadvantage here is that the
subscription rate must be set to absorb one-time
costs and possible losses in the first five years --
especially if the publisher is paper-based and must
absorb the costs of moving to electronic media.
The only safe route for the publisher -- and one used
for a few experimental efforts in existence -- is to
project costs and potential subscribers and then set
a price based on conservative estimates. This is
usually high, considering the initial investment in
equipment and staff and the uncertainty that
enough libraries have the network and hardware in
place to accommodate even the most basic
requirements in the first few years.
In order to assure that Johns Hopkins electronic
journals can be offered for less than paper journals,
we developed a financial plan in which grants and
special university funding cover one-time costs and
revenue losses during the first three years. Over this
period of time, the Press will move its paper journals
to electronic form at a rate of about twelve journals
per year. Although we are still at a preliminary stage
in our thinking about subscription arrangements, we
are hopeful that they will include the following
features:
- -- individual journals purchased in electronic form
only will be priced lower than paper journals.
Subscriptions to both print and electronic versions
will be lower than the full price of each.
- -- subscribers to the entire database of electronic
journals (which will move from twelve to forty over
three years) will receive a discount off the combined
single rates of all titles included in the database.
- -- Charter subscribers will receive the first year's
electronic-journal subscription free, as well as a
guaranteed discount for a fixed number of years.
There will be no extra charge for any new journal
titles added during the current year, and free access
reports will be available.
Staffing Concerns
It's not that the press is changing what it does. Just
the way it does it. For marketing, as detailed above,
this means engaging in educational activities as well
as promotional ones, and for rights and permissions,
costing, and pricing it has meant reexamining the
way we do business and crafting a model and
financial plan that benefits both the publisher and
its library partners.
The shift from paper to electronic media affects us
at an even more basic level, however -- adapting our
existing staff to a new process and adding new
positions with titles like "systems manager" and
"technical support." It is in these areas where our
partnership with libraries will help us the most,
where developing a prototype involved not only
looking to our library and academic computing
center for advice but also for descriptions of staff
positions essential to the success of an electronic
venture.
Conclusion
According to April 1994 Harper's Index, the
percentage change, since 1992, in New York Times
articles mentioning the "information superhighway"
is +2,025. According to the editors of the Digital
Information Group's CD-ROM Factbook, CD-ROM
revenue will reach about $15 billion in business-to-
business -- or publisher-to-library -- sales by the year
2000. Online revenue will top $20 billion.
University libraries and scholarly publishers need to
be part of this revolution by adopting a new way of
doing business -- a partnership of interest that offers
the opportunity to move from space- and resource-
consuming paper products to networked, digital text
that promises better access to more robust
resources with a friendlier environmental impact.
The Johns Hopkins experience is just the beginning
of this metamorphosis and will certainly not
accommodate every contingency at the start. We
believe, however, that at the very least it will serve as
a useful model for publishers and libraries to begin
developing partnerships with the mutual goal of
reinvigorating and redefining the scholarly
communication process in the 21st century.
------- End of Forwarded Message
