[UPS] Something of interest....

[Eric F. Van de Velde]

All,
I think this group will be interested in the
following. Dana Roth, a Caltech technical reference
librarian, and some of his activist colleagues
recently sent the following letter to the
journal editors of a journal that will remain
anonymous (to protect the guilty).
As yet there is no response.

Dana and his colleagues intend to pursue this
course of action with other journals.

Please enjoy and encourage your librarians to take
an activist approach!
--Eric Van de Velde.

======================================================


Professor XXXXX, Professor XXXXX
Editors, Journal of XXXXX

Dear Professors XXXXX and XXXXX:

We are librarians at institutions that currently
subscribe to the Journal of XXXXX, which you edit.
While there are worthwhile articles published in this
journal, we notice that a substantial portion of
its content (approximately 44% in 1998) consists of
extraneous or substandard material, including:
	*bibliographies, e.g. of the spectroscopic
	 literature, which are of little use in this age
	 of electronic databases;
	*conference proceedings (unrefereed, or refereed
	 to a lower standard than that for primary research
	 journals) --   note the article by Barschall and
	 Haeberli, "What's Wrong with these Conferences?",
	 Physics Today, December 1992, pages 79-81, for
	 some reasons why these shouldn't appear in 
	 journals;
	*Festschriften containing contributions of mixed,
	 but often of mediocre or low quality.

>From our point of view this superfluous material merely
pads out the journal to increase its subscription price.
As your customers, we have the right to insist upon
higher standards in this extraordinarily expensive
product (approximately $10,000 in FY 2000 for about
10,000 pages per year) which we have, up until now,
supported with our subscriptions. Indeed it is our duty
to our institutions to insist on value for the money
which we spend. As currently constituted, the Journal of
XXXXX does not provide good value for our subscription
dollars -- as indicated by its unimpressive ISI "impact
factor" of  0.XXX (1997), which ranks XXth out of
86 journals in ISI's Physical Chemistry category.  The
median impact factor in this category was 1.1815.
[Theochem was 0.913, 56th.]

Although we would be willing -- at this time -- to
continue our support of the standard, refereed articles
that appear in the Journal of XXXXX, we are no longer
willing (nor do we have the funds) to support material
of the sort listed above.  We strongly urge the Journal's
editorial board to eliminate, or at least sharply reduce,
the amount of extraneous material, resulting in a
proportional reduction in price.

We hope that by working together on this issue we can
resolve these problems and so allow the continuation of
an improved Journal of XXXXX.

Finally, we note that of course we are aware that other
journals, including titles from other publishers, include
unnecessary padding that increases the price. It is our
intention to identify other such journals and to contact
their editors so as to make known our interests as
customers.

          Sincerely,

(signatories in alphabetical order; opinions expressed
are our own, not necessarily those of our institutions)

Tina E. Chrzastowski
Chemistry Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CHRZ@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu

Howard Dess
Rutgers University
Library of Science and Medicine
dess@rci.rutgers.edu

David Flaxbart
University of Texas at Austin
Head, Chemistry Library
Welch Hall 2.132
Austin TX 78712
flaxbart@uts.cc.utexas.edu

David Goodman
Biology Librarian, and
Co-Chair, Electronic Journals Task Force
Princeton University Library
dgoodman@princeton.edu

Erja Kajosalo
Chemistry Librarian
MIT Science Library
14S-134
kajosalo@po7.mit.edu

Robert Michaelson
Science and Engineering Library
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois  60208
rmichael@nwu.edu

Dana L. Roth
Caltech 1-32
1200 E. California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91125
dzrlib@library.caltech.edu

Kendall Rouse,  Head, Chemistry Library
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1101 University Ave.
Madison     WI     53706
Email: krouse@macc.wisc.edu

David Stern
Director of Science Libraries and Information Services
Kline Science Library
Yale University
219 Prospect Street
P.O. Box 208111
New Haven, CT  06520-8111
email:  david.e.stern@yale.edu

Gary D. Wiggins
Chemistry Library
800 E. Kirkwood Avenue
Chemistry Bldg C003
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN  47405-7102
E-mail: wiggins@indiana.edu