This is a privately circulated note for clients of Electronic Publishing
Ltd., and I am forwarding it to you because of its direct relevance.
Please do *not* further forward it.  EPS provides consultancy to the
publishing industry, and it is interesting to see their view of the JSTOR
deal.

>Envelope-to: [log in to unmask]
>Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 08:21:10 +0100
>Cc: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
>    [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
>    [log in to unmask]
>From: Joanna Saltford-Beaman <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: JSTOR
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>
>
>Client Confidential - for internal research and
>briefing purposes only. This is NOT a press release.
>
>
>
>
>EPS UPDATE NOTE: 28TH APRIL 1998
>
>
>JSTOR signs first UK licence
>
>
>* JSTOR, the US collaborative journals host, has signed its first non-US
>site licence agreement with the UK Higher Education Funding Council.
>
>The JSTOR model may yet prove a larger threat to the unfettered control
>of STM research journal publishers than any of their own competitive
>manoeuvrings. Beginning as a Mellon Foundation funded initiative in
>economics and history journal publishing, and using digital library
>resources based at the University of Michigan, JSTOR is now a successful
>not-for-profit implementation with sixteen months of live operations and
>some useful experience under its belt. The original ten journals were
>captured in full text from inception to a negotiated point in time - 2
>to 5 years - behind current publication. Since launch in January 1997
>agreement has been reached to load the full text of a further 66 titles,
>with a target of 100 by the year 2000. Titles selected must have
>university subscriptions of over 1000, and the current targets are all
>in the social sciences, humanities and mathematics, although the
>organisers at JSTOR claim to be having discussions about the natural
>sciences and medicine.
>
>JSTOR is a charity, and its revenue objective is cost recovery.
>Participating publishers receive access fees, though these are unlikely
>to amount to commercial returns. Few top flight journal publishers in
>the commercial sector currently participate except for Wiley and
>Blackwells, though most university presses (including Oxford and
>Cambridge) and many learned societies are in the first lists of
>participants. JSTOR's costs are heavy: it creates an image file of the
>entire back-run of chosen journals, and delivers page images. In order
>to support search and retrieval of articles, it runs a parallel OCR-
>created text file (not available to users for download) and an index
>file with citation and table of contents information. Once the service
>is established in a university library - there are now 263 site licenses
>issued to US academic institutions - publishers must undertake not to
>withdraw a title but to grant a perpetual licence so long as the scheme
>is in operation. In the first three months of 1998 www.jstor.org
>recorded some 1 million searches and printed some 77 thousand articles
>as a result of 170 thousand articles retrieved. There are no individual
>users, only site licences, and licence holders agree a contract that
>specifies rights to download but not to re-use or reproduce articles
>from the database.
>
>The HEFC licence in the UK is a natural extension. A mirror site has
>been set up at MIDAS (Manchester Information Datasets and Associated
>Services), making that unit a counter force to BIDS at Bath and
>emphasising that the HEFC's Joint Information Services Committee is
>anxious to see several centres of excellence emerge on JANET in the UK.
>JANET and SuperJANET are vital to the scheme: all that image
>transmission calls for heavy bandwidth. Meanwhile JSTOR is creating real
>user satisfaction where archival holdings are a space and resources
>problem, even if it is not bang up to date. It also proves a point that
>the academic community, still at war with commercial publishers over
>pricing and re-use, dearly want to make: there is no mystery about
>successful digital service development and if needs must, in areas where
>commercial forces were not prepared to invest, they can do it for
>themselves.
>
>
>For further comment please call EPS; tel: 0171 837 3345 or fax: 0171 837
>8901.
>
>-ends-
>
>UNJ/280498/DRW/026
>
>Joanna Saltford-Beaman

>

Professor Charles Oppenheim
Dept of Information and Library Studies
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leics LE11 3TU

01509-223065
Fax 01509-223053




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