Sociological Research Online is an electronic journal receiving funds from
the UK's eLib program for three years, 1995 to 1998. After that date, the
journal is expected to become self-funding.
The Management Board (of which I am Chair) is now debating the value of a
number of alternative schemes for raising income after 1998 and would value
the views of members of this list.
The context is that SocResOnline published 4 issues during the calendar
year 1996 (averaging 4 full length articles and several reviews per issue)
and expects to continue to publish at this rate. The journal is a fully
refereed academic journal covering the central issues of sociology. Papers
are published in HTML. One indicator of the journal's impact is the number
of submissions it receives - and the rate is already up to that expected
for a successful and established paper journal covering general sociology.
Another indicator is the number of readers - it averages a 'hit rate' of
about 200 per day, from all over the world.
We estimate that once the tools and procedures we have been developing to
run the journal have been completed, and the journal is established, it
would cost about 15,000 pounds per annum to run.
One possible route to raising this sum is by selling site licenses and
restricting access - at least to the complete papers - to sites which have
purchased a license. We estimate that we could obtain the income we need
if site licenses were to cost 100 pounds each, which is the same order of
magnitude as a library subscription to conventional paper sociology
journals. We would include in the subscription an annual, cumulative
CD-ROM of past issues. This would be the only tangible and permanent
aspect of the purchase.
The advantages of a site license over individual subscriptions relate to
the difficulties of developing an acceptable and low-cost scheme to charge
readers. Charging authors ('page-charges') is not feasible because unlike
in the sciences, there are few authors (about 20 per year maximum) and so
the charges would have to enormous to raise the required income. Our
experiments with advertising suggest that it will bring in relatively small
amounts of money.
The disadvantages of a site license scheme include:
* it imposes additional costs on libraries
* it disadvantages peripheral scholars and countries (e.g., the
sociologist working in a technical university; the sociologist working in
Lithuania)
* it might be cheaper for libraries to buy 'inter-library loans' (whatever
they might look like!) than to subscribe to the journal.
The decisions we will eventually make on these matters will also have an
impact on our policy on matters such as:
- we are beginning to receive requests to allow direct links from Library
catalogues to articles in the journal.
- we have been asked whether a library can be permitted to maintain a
mirror of the journal.
Your reactions to these ideas (which I should emphasise, are matters of
ongoing debate within the Management Board, not settled policy) would be
very welcome.
_________________________________________________________________________
Prof G. Nigel Gilbert, Dept of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford,
GU2 5XH, United Kingdom. Tel: +44 (0)1483 259173 Fax: +44 (0)1483 306290
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