In message <v03007815af3894e4428b@[131.227.118.140]>, Nigel Gilbert
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>
>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.
I think an important issue here is 'how do you define an ejournal?' If
its going to look (essentially) the same as the printed version, the
only advantage of having it available across the web is its currency,
the reduction in printing and distribution costs, and ease of use of
readers for downloading articles.
Have you taken into consideration what else you can do with an ejournal?
The added value of extra links, further information on other work
authors have published, providing reference points to other web sites
which are doing research in the same areas? The ability to have ongoing
discussions about particular articles? The possibility of having online
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) sessions with authors? Linking the journal
into appropriate virtual conferences/exhibitions etc? Searching the
archives etc etc etc...
The more value you can put into the thing, the more attractive its going
to be to your potential audiance.
>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.
Thats obviously a very healthy hit rate, and certainly indicates that
you're doing the right sort of things, but I'd also ask the question
'How many of those are returns?'. Any half decent web site/journal will
get a lot of people visiting it simply because its new. I'd suggest that
the sign of a really good site can be based on the number of people who
return to it time and time again. You should also be able to use your
access logs to tell you where people are coming from, both
geographically and institutionally, which should give you useful data.
Also, you need to be able to tell what they're actually doing at the
site; do they just look at the opening page, or are they actually
combing through the journal. If so, which are the popular articles, and
why? This again is another advantage of an electronic version; you can
get much better information about exactly what interests and appeals to
the readership than you can with a print version. Consequently, you can
be reactive to your readership in ways that are not easy using paper.
>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.
Can I ask (rhetorically) how you arrived at this figure? Lets agree for
sake of arguement the following:
an average of 50 hits per day, to take into account people from the same
institution visiting the site - thats 18,250 hits per year, which would
mean that at a 1UKP per hit you've covered costs. Each institution would
have to visit the site 100 times per year to cover the subscription
cost; is that reasonable? (I don't know, which is why I'm asking the
question).
I'd also like to press you a little bit further here; you're taking a
tradition method of charging and attempting to impose it onto a rather
different medium. Why? Are you taking into account that, in the (not too
distant future) its going to be possible to charge for access to
individual papers, and bill an electronic account for that. If you
follow the route you're currently proposing, how easy are you going to
find it to change to a micro-economic model? I might not want to read
every issue - I might just want to read one article from the journal in
my lifetime. I'd be happy to pay to do that, if (and its a big if) I can
do so easily and with minimum hassle. In the future, its going to be
technically very easy to set up such a system, and have you included
that possibility in your calculations?
>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.
I'm all in favour of CD-ROM, as many people know. But I'd again ask the
question - why bother? If I'm paying you an annual fee, why can't I just
download it, put it up on my intranet and allow access from everyone in
my organisation? I'll accumulate it, make it available etc. Even if the
server dies and I've not backed up, I can just use something like
Webwhacker to come back, grab the lot and start afresh. I don't see what
value a CD-ROM is going to give me. I can see what problems its going to
cause - installing the thing, ensuring it can run over a network, using
up another drive to allow access, ringing you up with my technical
problems etc... the horrors!
In fact - do I even want a 'tangible and permanent aspect'? What I want
is the information when and how I want it. I don't care what format its
in, but I want it now! A CD-ROM is no more tangible than a hard disk,
after all - there's nothing I can do with a CD-ROM without the attendant
software. If I'm a member of an institution working at home, the
information professional isn't going to lend me the one copy - I'm going
to be expected to (and will probably want) to simply dial into my campus
intranet and take what I need when I want it. Fewer equipment overheads
that way.
>
>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.
Yes, I'll agree with what you say here, with one proviso.. 'at the
moment'. By all means introduce a site licence etc, but bear in mind
that its going to become increasingly easier for single users to connect
to your site, find the article they want and download it on payment of a
small fee. Lets look at your figures and hit rates another way, and this
time I'll take your 200 hits per day average and play with some other
statistics. That works out to 73,000 hits per year, and to match your
15,000 UKP per year running costs thats... thats about .25p per hit to
access the site in its entirity, which if the site is as good and as
popular as you say (and I'm sure it is!), that sounds like a good deal
to me. Even if charging reduces your readership by half, you've still
only got to charge .50p per hit to access the entire site. (Obviously
these figures are total guesses, and may be completely out, but you get
the idea!).
All nice in theory, and unworkable at present, but its not always going
to stay that way, and if the net continues to change as quickly as it
has been doing, its not going to stay that unworkable for long.
Something to keep in mind?
>Our
>experiments with advertising suggest that it will bring in relatively small
>amounts of money.
I'm sure you're exactly right here. Unless you can bring in a lot of
money, its not going to work, and will only annoy your readers if they
have to sit and wade through a whole bunch of adverts which they didn't
want to see in the first place.
>
>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.
Again, I think you're absolutely right here. What *I* want from an
ejournal is ease of access, when I want it, how I want it, and to be
able to download a single article, or the entire quarterly if I so
desire. If you can make it as easy and painless as possible, then I'll
be happy to pay that .25p or .50p for that. If I've got to sign up for
the entire thing, and its going to cost 100UKP, then I'm not going to
bother, I'm sorry to say.
Consequently, I'd suggest something else to think about here; is the
value of your journal going to be in the collection of a series of
articles, or in the value of publishing articles which stand on their
own merits? Indeed, why publish on a quarterly basis anyway? Why stick
to a print format when you can just add in new articles as and when
they're available? No reason why you shouldn't run a small listserve to
tell subscribers when something new has been added, surely? However,
thats a side route away from my original point, which I'll now get back
to.....
The value that you can provide is in the peer review process; I want
reassurance that the material I read on the web is of a high quality,
written by respected authors in a field, and definately if its a field I
don't know much about. I'm prepared to pay for that reassurance. I'd
also be prepared to pay for the opportunity to sit and chat with authors
in a discussion moderated by yourselves, for example. Surely therefore
the value of the ejournal lies in the value of your organisation as much
as the articles themselves? I'm not actually interested in a pre-packed
electronic version of a paper journal, I want something different when
I'm using this medium, and all those value added services which print
cannot offer are just as important.
>
>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.
Doesn't suprise me in the slightest. If you produce, free, a table of
contents and abstracts you'll also be getting direct requests from end
users who want to buy that single article.
>- we have been asked whether a library can be permitted to maintain a
>mirror of the journal.
Then there are intranets as well, which may well be exactly what you
mean and I'm just being pedantic. If I'm taking out a subscription to
your ejournal, am I taking out a subscription which just allows me to
read the stuff on the screen, or which allows me to download it in its
entirity to read at home, or to copy to other members of my
organisation, or to copy it onto my own web site (with proper credits,
naturally!), or to take say, a spreadsheet and play around with the way
that the data is presented to me?
>
>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.
Hope you find the above to be of some interest; just a few ideas, and a
lot of personal opinion!
Phil.
--
Electronic Publishing Consultant: CD-ROM, Networking, Internet, WWW.
Author: Information Science, CD-ROM, Networking, Internet.
Trainer: CD-ROM, Internet, Web Page design, Training.
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