FEATURE ARTICLE
Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals
Can scientists find ways to share published research without high cost? The experiences of one society suggest it can be done cheaply, even profitably
Thomas Walker
Cheap Digital Publishing: The FES Story
While serials prices were climbing steeply, printing technology was rapidly changing—moving from metal type-handling through the "paste-up" of type set on photographic compositors to the electronic page composition and platemaking of the present decade. It eventually proved very economical to transform the electronic files used to "image" printing plates into files that could be displayed and printed on remote personal computers.
Again, the mathematics, physics and computer-science communities have made special strides, developing and sharing software that produces files that can be printed equally well by a desktop, remote computer or traditional printing press (although these files are not easily used by those of us outside those communities). But in other fields, such as my own, the diversity of source files and the different nature of our work has required a format capable of working with various word-processor documents and graphic elements.
The Florida Entomological Society's success with low-cost electronic publishing is based on its use of the file format known as the PDF, or Portable Document Format (produced by Adobe Acrobat software). For about $1 a page, a journal printer can save individual articles as PDF files, which can be read and printed with free software that is available for computers using any major operating system. The articles retain the appearance of the printed originals; effectively, a PDF file is a stored photocopy-quality image that can be searched and read on a computer screen or used to make a faithful printout at home or in the office. The costs of serving journal articles this way are the cost of space on a a Web-serving computer and of preparing and maintaining table-of-contents files with hypertext links to articles. Web-server space costs an estimated 35 cents per megabyte per year, a PDF file for an average article is about 0.6 megabytes, and the average journal has 123 articles annually (Tenopir and King 1997). Thus posting a year's contents of an average journal should cost less than $26 annually. The user must of course have a Web connection, "client" software and, if hard copy is desired, a printer.
The Florida Entomological Society has about 450 members. In November 1994, a few weeks after free software to display and print Acrobat PDF files became available, the Society started posting all articles in Florida Entomologist (An International Journal for the Americas), its long-published (since 1917) refereed journal. Our start-up costs were less than $500. Since then, features have been added, but the total cost to the society of preparing articles for publication on the Web is less than $3 per page. From the beginning, the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA), which serves Florida's 10 public universities, has provided encouragement and permanent posting of all files on its Web server at no charge. Other research libraries should be expected to offer societies free posting for open-access PDF versions of their traditionally published journals. The service costs little to provide, and libraries are firmly on the side of convenient access for users. (This access is permanent, in contrast to site licenses for commercially published journals that must be renewed every year or so.)
Incorporated in the FES project more recently has been the posting of minimal HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) files in addition to the PDF files. Since the indexing robots of Web search services ignore PDF files, this was necessary to expose the full text of all on-line articles to the robots. Adding the HTML took about $300 to start and continues at a cost of $20 per issue. Next, the society installed on its home page a search engine that can find any article among its journal's on-line issues. This program searches the full text of the on-line HTML files, which link to the PDF files. For this service, the society paid $130 to the Internet company that prepared its home page.
Because the responses to the initial phases of its e-publication project were so positive, FES has recently initiated two new services. The first, begun in February, gives authors the opportunity to permanently post computer files that are pertinent to their on-line articles. These files, accessed via hyperlinks in the on-line tables of contents, can include color pictures, full data sets, and sound and video clips. The author pays a one-time fee of $45 for the service, and FES expects to earn an average of $40 per "AuthorLink."
Secondly, FES has begun to make back (pre-electronic) issues available at no cost on the Web. Inspired by JSTOR (for Journal Storage), a nonprofit organization that pioneered techniques for putting back runs of journals on the Web, FES has contracted to have all articles in the society's journal, from 1917 to 1994 (some 20,000 pages), scanned, read by optical-character-recognition software and indexed. After pilot tests were completed last year, the $12,000 needed for this contract (60 cents per page) was raised from industry and the University of Florida. The Florida Center for Library Automation is putting these files on-line as part of its digital library, where they will be accessible and searchable without cost to all Web users with the same software and to the same high degree as the electronic versions of the 650 Elsevier journals that FCLA has recently leased and can make available only to patrons of five participating libraries.
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